Eppelsheim

Eppelsheim
Coat of arms
Eppelsheim
Location of Eppelsheim within Alzey-Worms district
Coordinates: 49°42′N 8°9′E / 49.700°N 8.150°E / 49.700; 8.150Coordinates: 49°42′N 8°9′E / 49.700°N 8.150°E / 49.700; 8.150
Country	Germany
State	Rhineland-Palatinate
District	Alzey-Worms
Municipal assoc.	Alzey-Land
Government
• Mayor	Ute Klenk-Kaufmann
Area
• Total	5.57 km2 (2.15 sq mi)
Elevation	179 m (587 ft)
Population (2015-12-31)
• Total	1,270
• Density	230/km2 (590/sq mi)
Time zone	CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
Postal codes	55234
Dialling codes	06735
Vehicle registration	AZ
Website	www.eppelsheim.de

Eppelsheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

The municipality lies in Rhenish Hesse.

The council is made up of 16 council members, who were elected at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairwoman.

The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results:

The municipality’s arms might be described thus: Per pale sable a lion rampant Or armed and langued gules, and Or an apple twig fructed of two vert.

The Dinotherium-Museum in Eppelsheim shows original finds of fossil mammals from deposits some ten million years old from the prehistoric Rhine near Eppelsheim. These deposits are known as the Deinotherium Sands, because they often contain teeth and bones from the extinct proboscid Deinotherium. One attraction at the Dinotherium-Museum is the cast of a Deinotherium skull that was unearthed in 1835 near Eppelsheim. Also near Eppelsheim came the historically first discovery in 1820 of a fossil femur of a great ape Paidopithex rhenanus (now considered to be an ape relative not an ape - possibly being a Pliopithecoid). The Dinotherium-Museum was former mayor Heiner Roos’s brainchild.

The Dorfgraben, also called the Effenring, was a heart-shaped ditch that surrounded the mediaeval village, serving along with its banked walls as both a flood ditch and a village fortification. Its beginnings seem to have brought woes, though. History records only one dispute, in the late 14th century, between the von Dalberg family and the municipality. One family member claimed part of the dyke as his own. The ensuing negotiations ended with a compromise: one part each was allotted to the von Dalberg family and the municipality.

The four roads leading out of the village in the cardinal compass directions were particularly well secured with portcullises at the four gates (Pforten), the (the Hangen-Weisheimer Pforte, the Flomborner Pforte, the Dintesheimer Pforte and the Alzeyer Pforte).