News

Alte Pinakothek, München26. November 2024 – 16. März 2025 No other Dutch artist has received as much praise during her lifetime as the Amsterdam painter Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750). Her biographer admiringly called her“Holland’s artistic miracle” and “our ingenious art heroine”. Her magnificent, deceptively realistic flower still lifes with plants and fruits, butterflies and insects from […]

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 […]

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to our long-time colleague, friend and confidant Dr. Stefan Schmidt, who left us far too early on March 13. Stefan was always a driving force at the ZSM, mostly in the background, but always efficient and goal-oriented, and this in so many things such as collection […]

Skeletal pathologies in ancient Egyptian baboon mummies suggest health problems due to inadequate nutrition and chronic lack of sunlight. An international team led by the Belgian archaeozoologist Prof. Wim van Neer from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences examined baboon mummies from Ancient Egypt, around 3,000 years old. Apparently, the animals suffered from various […]

Paleontologists from Portugal, Denmark and Germany have discovered a new species of phytosaur – a bizarre crocodile-like reptile from the Late Triassic – in more than 215 million-year-old river and lake sediments in Jameson Land, East Greenland. SNSB paleontologist Dr. Oliver Wings was also involved in the discovery and description of the fossil. The researchers […]