Inside Mainz's Natural History Museum: curating fossils from 20,000 to 400 million years old
Staff at the Natural History Museum in Mainz curate fossils spanning hundreds of millions of years, from Ice Age mammal bones to ancient shark remains, drawing researchers from around the world to the underground storage rooms of Rhineland-Palatinate.
A window into the Ice Age
Manuel Stenger stands surrounded by the remains of a time when mammoths, reindeer and even hippopotamuses roamed the region around Mainz. He works in the Ice Age collection of the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum), where he collects, preserves, identifies and communicates the natural history of Rhineland-Palatinate. The pieces in this collection are between 20,000 and 400,000 years old, Stenger explained. Temperature fluctuations allowed hippopotamuses to migrate into the area at times, while mammoths lived there during the same period.
The bulk of the collection was assembled after the Second World War, when numerous gravel pits were created in the Rhine-Main area because material was needed for reconstruction. During excavation, bones came to light that the Rhine had enclosed in its deposits over hundreds of thousands of years. Today, it is mainly private collectors who supply new pieces to the museum.
Identifying bones without find data
The museum recently received a hobby collection from a humanities scholar, but the exact find data were missing and the bones could no longer be clearly assigned to a particular animal. That is where Stenger's work begins: he unpacks the bones, examines their shapes and compares them with bone atlases, reference works for skeletal identification. Step by step, he narrows down the answer: is it a bovine? A rhinoceros? Or does the bone belong to another animal genus? If a piece is damaged, it is carefully treated and conserved.
Most of the time, the process stops at this preliminary identification. The exact species determination is left to experts. Researchers from around the world use the treasures stored in the underground of central Mainz.
We had Chinese collection guests, we had Swedish collection guests, who then research individual animal groups and want to look at our material. That is what this storage here is for.
400 million years in rolling shelves
A few neighbourhoods away, at the other end of Mainz, boxes are stacked in a two-story hall. Hidden between rolling shelves, the path opens into a time when sharks and sea cows still swam through the Mainz Basin. Kai Nungesser, a trained biologist, maintains and catalogues treasures up to 400 million years old for the Natural History Museum there. Solving puzzles and reconstructing entire worlds from these individual pieces is what appeals to him about his work.
When reconstructuring past animal worlds, Nungesser relies above all on fossil finds and comparisons with related species. This is evident with sharks, for example, where even some related species are already extinct. Scholars have been arguing for decades about exactly how large some of these species were.
Statewide collaboration
According to the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz (GDKE), rocks and fossils from various periods of Earth's history surface in nearly all regions of the state. They are exposed through construction work, raw material extraction or natural erosion, providing insight into the billions-of-years-old history of Rhineland-Palatinate. The GDKE works closely with the museum in Mainz.
