News

The international initiative Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) provides free and permanent access to scientific data and information on global biodiversity. The annual GBIF Activity Report Germany for 2025 was recently published: Last year, 23.7 million new observation and collection data records from German organizations were made available to the GBIF network (www.gbif.org). With 16 […]

A newly examined prehistoric shark species from the age of dinosaurs provides surprising insights into the early evolution of modern sharks. It cannot be confidently assigned to any shark order that exists today and thus calls into question previous assumptions about the evolution of modern sharks. The approximately 25-centimetre-long animal named Bavariscyllium, which stands out […]

SNSB Director General Prof. Dr Jörg Overmann says ‘Thank you!’ Volunteering means people giving their time and skills for the good of the community – without any financial reward. At the SNSB, well over 200 volunteers are passionately and devotedly involved in a wide variety of areas of collection and research. One of them is […]

Bavarian State Collection of PalaeoanatomyMunich, 2025-11-14: A groundbreaking archaeological study has revealed when domestic dogs first began to show the remarkable diversity that characterises them today. By applying cutting-edge shape analysis to hundreds of archaeological specimens spanning tens of thousands of years, researchers have traced the emergence of distinct dog forms deep into prehistory pinpointing […]

In July 2025, SNSB scientist Prof. Dr. Michael Krings was elected as a corresponding member of the Göttingen Accademy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony (Niedersächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen). The Göttingen Accademy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony was founded in 1751 and currently has around 380 full and corresponding members […]

Prof. Dr. Dr. Joris Peters hands over his position as Director General of the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History to Prof. Dr. Jörg Overmann Since his appointment as Director General of the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns SNSB) in 2022, Prof. Peters has been committed to restructuring the SNSB […]

Moving from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig to the SNSB on August 1 – Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts Markus Blume: “Prof. Dr. Jörg Overmann is an outstanding appointment: he is an excellent scientist with outstanding experience in managing large non-university research institutions.” “Spectacular move from Braunschweig to Munich: Prof. Dr. […]

Open Science, Information, and Research Infrastructure OSIRIS is a consortium and collaboration project involving (currently) 17 host and additional partner institutions, working together to establish the first global foundation for an integrated, interdisciplinary infrastructure for collections, information, and research, the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) is one of them. In Germany, over 160 […]

NFDI4Biodiversitiy News Thanks to the cooperation of several partners in the NFDI4Biodiversity network, a data set with 5,467 georeferenced animal observations from Bavarian forestry offices was digitized and prepared for scientific use. Biodiversity research thrives on data that makes developments over time visible. However, historical data on species occurrences is rare. A unique example from […]

Naturkundemuseum Bamberg Palaeontologists of the University College Cork (UCC) and the SNSB have solved a hundred-year-old mystery of how some fossil frogs preserve their fleshy parts – it’s all down to their skin. Palaeontologists Daniel Falk and Prof. Maria McNamara, together with scientists from Ireland, Germany and the UK, studied 45 million year old fossil […]