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.

Repost from my now-defunct Past Worlds blog

From: T.C. Winkler (1874), “Le Pterodactylus kochi du Musée Teyler”.

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.

26,5 meters of dinosaur from Valium Chat on Vimeo.

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.

In 1937 all that would change, and the hall took on the shape that is essentially unaltered until today, dominated by Brachiosaurus, the largest mounted specimen of a dinosaur in the world (as a proud plaque at its foot will tell you). These pictures show the work in progress, and the eventual result. That image did not really change until late 2008, when a new display of the three large dinosaurs in the Lichthof was opened. However, it remains centered around Brachiosaurus.

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. The animal is a copy of the Diplodocus in Pittsburgh, donated by Andrew Carnegie to the French people and unveiled in 1908 amidst much aplomb. The original wooden blocks used to separate the caudal vertebrae are still in place, and even the original platform is intact. I wouldn’t be surprised it the beast hasn’t been moved for over a century.

The head is mounted rather strangely compared to modern reconstructions; because of the position of the atlas (first vertebra) and the head, it was impossible to mount it straight on the neck. After some consideration, Holland thought this position ‘more elegant’ compared to the rather more straightforward position on the London copy.