Selected press releases in English

Staatssammlung für Paläoanatomie München: Mitogenetic diversity of sheep did not decline in the Anatolian distribution area of wild sheep when sheep husbandry developed in the early Neolithic c. 10,000 years ago, as previously assumed. SNSB and LMU zooarchaeologist Prof. Joris Peters and collaborators could show that matrilineal diversity remained high during the first 1,000 years […]

New research findings reveal: some children in early medieval Bavaria were breastfed for much longer periods than today. Also, many early Bavarians buried around 500 AD originate from other geographical regions where feeding practices apparently differed. A team of researchers led by the SNSB anthropologists Michaela Harbeck and Maren Velte analyzed human teeth from various […]

Staatssammlung für Paläoanatomie München Birds were an important source of food for hunter-gatherer communities in Upper Mesopotamia at the beginning of the Neolithic period, around 9,000 years BCE. This is shown in a new study by SNSB and LMU archaeozoologists Dr. Nadja Pöllath and Prof. Dr. Joris Peters. The two scientists analysed bird remains from […]

Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie In long-lived lakes that existed for millions of years freshwater snails developed a particularly high diversity of species. A new study by SNSB paleobiologist Thomas A. Neubauer now shows the importance of these ecosystems for the evolution of freshwater snails on a global and deep-time scale. Neubauer has summarized […]

Two valuable collections of fungi watercolours preserved at the Botanische Staatssammlung München (SNSB-BSM) are now available on the Bavarian state‘s website „bavarikon“, an online service provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The illustrations by the two artists and fungi experts Konrad Schie-ferdecker and Dr. Fritz Wohlfarth are not only scientifically important, but they are also a […]

Zoologische Staatssammlung München The differences are in the details: Special 3D shape analyses of the jaws and dentitions of cave bears and brown bears living at the same time from the fossil site in the caves of Goyet in Belgium show their clearly different food spectrum. In contrast, the diet of brown bears living around […]

LMU, Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology und Geology, Bavarian State Collection for Zoology LMU and SNSB researchers have identified coral-eating crown-of-thorns seastars in the Red Sea as distinct species that occurs only in this location. Tropical coral reefs are among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth. In addition to climate change, coral-eating crown-of-thorns seastars (Acanthaster […]

A German-Czech research team presents a new binational data infrastructure. Over the past four years, the project “Flora of the Bohemian Forest” has made scientific data available from historical species monitoring projects in both countries as well as new data on the current plant diversity of the Bohemian Forest (Šumava). The data is publicly online […]

Staatssammlung für Paläoanatomie München Genetic analyses by an international team involving researchers from the Bavarian State Collection for Paleoanatomy an the LMU Munich show that the Romans were the first to bring mules to Central Europe. Before horses were the only riding animals used by people there. Until the end of the Iron Age in […]

New research transforms our understanding of the circumstances and timing of the domestication of chickens, their spread across Asia into the west, and reveals the changing way in which they were perceived in societies over the past 3,500 years. Experts have found that an association with rice farming likely started a process that has led […]