The remains of a model of a whale in the inner courtyard of the bombed-out Natural History Museum in Berlin, 1945 (Museum für Naturkunde, Historische Bild- und Schriftsammlungen).
The museum, which is home to some of the greatest palaeontological specimens in the world (e.g., the most famous Archaeopteryx lithographica specimen and the huge Brachiosaurus brancai from Tendaguru, Tanzania) is still in a state of reconstruction. Recently, it central hall (’Lichthof’) was reopened after an extensive overhaul.
From: T.C. Winkler (1874), “Le Pterodactylus kochi du Musée Teyler”. Extract from Archives du Musée Teyler, Vol. III, Fasc. 4 (Haarlem: De Erven Loosjes).
Tiberius Cornelis Winkler (1822-1897) was one of the illustrious curators of geology and minerology at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands (his successor was Eugène dubois, of Pithecanthropus repute). He became mainly identified with popularising Darwinism after having translated Darwin’s Origin into Dutch, but he spent most of his work cataloguing the Teyler collections. This illustration is from one of these descriptions.
In 1937, the specimen of the giant sauropod Brachiosaurus brancai that Werner Janensch et al. dug up in the Tendaguru beds of Tanzania (or »Tanganyika« as contemporaries would have dubbed it) was mounted in the central hall, the Lichthof, of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde.
Before that time, the hall was mainly taken up with whales. None of these are on display today, but before the advent of Brachiosaurus and his ilk the Museum für Naturkunde was more occupied with living nature than with extinct animals. In this photograph, the Lichthof is still dominated by the massive remains of four whales in the middle: two grey whales, one sperm whale and a reconstructed tail end. To the left is Dicraeosaurus hansemanni, like Brachiosaurus harvested from Tendaguru; to the right is Diplodocus carnegii, donated to the museum by Andrew Carnegie in 1908 and at the time its only dinosaur.
From a visit to the Paris Museum of Palaeontology, a few weeks back. In this ‘museum of a museum’, Diplodocus is featured in all its turn-of-the-(previous)-century glory. In fact this is the only one (as far as I know, but I haven’t seen the Bologna copy yet) still in its original position, as William Holland and Arthur Coggeshall put it up. Read more…
Digger of fossils, listener to music by obscure composers, ravisher of Type, cycler of eight daily kilometers to the Huygens Institute, and eight back, reader of sombre Scandinavian thrillers, Frisian fundamentalist with tongue firmly in cheek, watcher of British comedy, critical user of all that is Apple and collector of their older machines, eater of foods, drinker of beers (particularly German wheat beer), lamenting departer of Berlin, satisfied inhabiter of a seaside (or nearly so) apartment in The Hague, Netherlands.
