The Center of 'Orsten' Research and Exploration (= C.O.R.E.) in Ulm and the international C.O.R.E. Group were founded in 2005. Since then the CORE Group has increased to 37 members from no less than 8 countries from 4 continents plus Japan (go to member list above).

Our main issue is the concentration of expertise about the 'Orsten' and its fossils, the sites in which these occur, and related topics, last but not least the dissemination of information on the 'Orsten'.

To serve these purposes we created this website – with simple tools, so not as perfect as others – BUT we try to add more items continuously and to correct and update the content as regular as possible.

At present we still have some bias on information about the Swedish 'Orsten' lagerstätten, but we hope to add more from other 'Orsten' fossiles sites, such as in China, the UK (Comley), Poland, and Australia progressively. The localities from these countries contribute not only significantly to our knowledge about and around the 'Orsten' not only by adding different species, but they also add to our knowledge about other things like lithological, perservational and taphonomical issues. And they expanded the time frame of Orsten occurrences considerably. Lastly, and of course, the fossils from the new localities helped to improve and widen our evolutionary interpretations significantly.
See, e.g., papers from 2007, published in Nature in 2007, from 2010, published in Current Biology, or recently the papers by Maeda et al. 2011, by Terfelt and Eriksson in 2012 or papers by our Chinese colleagues from 2013 and 2013 (link to Publications above).

Selected publications on the Orsten are available including several from other CORE members than the Ulm team; otherwise pick their email address from the Contacts page (above) and ask them directly for PDFs.