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Tucked away in a staircase in the huge building of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, between the second and third floors, there is a small exhibit about the history of the museum that devotes a lot of space to the early history of the collection (and virtually none to those seven years after 1938 the Viennese…
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The town of Valkenburg is located in gently rolling hills on the southern border of the Dutch isthmus of Limburg, bordered by Belgium to the south and west, and Germany to the east. For centuries, people have been mining the rich sandstone deposits in the area, and have thus stumbled upon numerous fossils. Perhaps none…
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It is sometimes suggested that “alternative facts” are a new, or at least recent phenomenon, but anyone enversed in the history of science can probably easily rattle off a few well-chosen examples from times past. Sometimes, however, the division between what is real and imagined isn’t quite so clear, as the history of the search…
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In the early 1900s, zoological gardens throughout Europe began to incorporate images from extinct life to link it to extant nature. The most prominent of those was probably Carl Hagenbeck’s Urzeitpark, a series of statues of extinct creatures that became part of his revolutionary zoo in Stellingen near Hamburg in 1909. Although not the first…
