Two centuries of foraminiferal taxonomy: The primary type collection of the Natural History Museum Vienna

The last overview of Cenozoic localities with records of freshwater gastropods was provided more than 80 years ago. Since then, a wealth of new information has been published: new localities have been discovered and fundamental changes occurred in regional stratigraphy. In addition, many localities are still attributed to erroneous or outdated stratigraphical concepts even in recent papers. Geopolitical evolution of Europe has, furthermore, led to name changes and confusion regarding the exact origin of samples in collections. Here we provide a fully georeferenced dataset for almost all published Miocene and Pliocene freshwater gastropod localities (2,930), including updated stratigraphic data where possible. This basic update will serve as an essential fundament for any future work related to the freshwater deposits and respective faunas in general. Thomas A. Neubauer. Geological-Paleontological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria thomas.neubauer@nhm-wien.ac.at Elisavet Georgopoulou. Geological-Paleontological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria elisavet.georgopoulou@nhm-wien.ac.at Andreas Kroh. Geological-Paleontological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria andreas.kroh@nhm-wien.ac.at Mathias Harzhauser. Geological-Paleontological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria mathias.harzhauser@nhm-wien.ac.at Oleg Mandic. Geological-Paleontological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria oleg.mandic@nhm-wien.ac.at Daniela Esu. Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, “Sapienza” University of Rome, P.le A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy daniela.esu@uniroma1.it

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The Natural History Museum Vienna is one of the most important museums of natural history in the world. Its collections date back to the year 1750, when the Emperor Franz Stephan of Lorraine (Franz I. Stephan) purchased (from Italy) what was then the largest and most famous collection of natural history specimens. The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the eighteenth century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1750, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Although the first curators neither believed in the extraterrestrial origin nor accepted—in several cases—the written and witnessed histories of these allegedly “heavenly” stone and iron masses, they preserved them in the Natural History collection. Among the first acquisitions were the historical important meteorites Hraschina (Agram), Tabor, Krasnojarsk (Pallas iron), and Eichstädt. These and other well-documented specimens from the Vienna collection were, for example, used by E.F.F. Chladni for his seminal treatises of 1794 and 1819, respectively. The central figure in the early history of the collection is Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852). After the fall of the Stannern meteorite in 1808, he availed himself of every opportunity to acquire meteorite specimens. His continued interest in meteorites laid the foundation for the Vienna collection to be of the historical and scientific importance it is today. Due to the efforts of Schreibers, who also is regarded as founder of meteoritic science in Vienna, and his successors, the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the nineteenth century. In terms of the geological and paleontological collections, early expeditions and collecting campaigns were mainly targeting exotic animals and plants, while paleontological objects were welcome but subordinate. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the paleontological collections were—literally and figuratively speaking—systematically enlarged. Internationalization and diversification became the focus of the collection strategy. The paleontology collections at the Vienna museum also became important in the Darwinian view of evolution.

The nineteenth century was the dawn of scientific and systematic paleontology. The foundation of Natural History Museums—built as microcosmic “Books of Nature”—not only contributed to the establishment of this new discipline but also to its visual dissemination. This paper will take the metaphor of the “book” as a starting point for an examination of the paleontological exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. In keeping with “Natural Theology,” the earliest natural science museums in Britain were designed as expressions of the medieval idea of the “Holy Book of Nature.” Contrary to this, the Natural History Museum Vienna, opened in 1889, wanted to be a nonreligious museum of evolution. Nevertheless, the idea of the “book” was also influential for its design. According to the architects and the first director, it should be a modern “walk-in textbook” instructive for everyone. The most prominent exhibition hall in the museum is dedicated to paleontology. The hall’s decorative scheme forms a unique “Paleo-Gesamtkunstwerk” (Gesamtkunstwerk: total piece of art). The use of grotesque and mythological elements is a particularly striking feature of the hall’s decoration and raises the question of how this relates to the museum’s claim to be a hard-core science institution. As it was paleontology’s task to demystify the monsters and riddles of Earth history systematically, it seems odd that the decorative program connected explicitly to this world. This chapter sheds light on the cultural traditions that led to the creation of this ambiguous program that oscillates between science and imagination.

The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum of Vienna has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the 18th century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1748, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Owing to the efforts and scientific interest in meteorites of Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852) and his successors the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the 19th century. Simultaneously, the collection and its curators became one of the centres of the newly established science of meteoritics. The outbreak of the First World War and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy brought all these research activities and the growth of the collections at the Viennese museum to an abrupt end. Modest activities between the world wars were interrupted by the onset of the Second World War, again leading to a complete halt. It was not before the late 1960s that the situation improved and a budget for purchases permitted the acquisition of select contemporary meteorite falls and finds. From then on, the meteorites in the collection had again been used intensively for research purposes. Up until the end of the year 2003, the meteorite collection had increased to a total of 2336 localities.

Here we revise the entire Ephemeroptera collection of F.-J. Pictet deposited in the Natural History Museum of Geneva (MHNG) and voucher specimens housed in the Natural History Museum of Vienna (NMW). Due to several unforeseen turns of events, the MHNG collection was already in bad condition at the end of the 19th century. However, the specimens sent by V. Kollar to F.-J. Pictet, and used by the latter for his monograph (1843-1845), have been well curated after their return to the NMW and allow an important nomenclatural change. The species Baetis forcipulaF.-J. Pictet, 1843 is now considered a junior subjective synonym of Ephemera venosaFabricius, 1775, currently Ecdyonurus (Ecdyonurus) venosus (Fabricius, 1775). The specimens described by Thomas in 1968b from southwestern France under the name Ecdyonurus forcipula (F.-J. Pictet, 1843) belong to a new species, Ecdyonurus alaini Bauernfeind sp. nov., which is described herein. Mayfly specimens described by F.-J. Pictet's son, A.-E. Pictet, are also reviewed. Furthermore, information is provided on some other valuable specimens housed in the MHNG and NMW, such as Ametropus fragilisAlbarda, 1878 which was already collected in Italy in the 19th century, or Rhithrogena cinctaNavás, 1921 from the Spanish Pyrenees, which is the second specimen currently known of this species.

Eduard Hackel (1850–1926) was an Austrian botanist best known for his pioneering work on grasses (Poaceae), becoming one of the most famous and respected agrostologists of his time. In 2024, the botanical department of the Natural History Museum of Vienna received as a donation a collection of more than 700 letters sent to Eduard Hackel between 1870 and 1932 by botanists writing from 40 different countries, in 6 different languages. In botany, supplementary materials, such as the personal correspondence of scientists, field notes or diaries, hold a great potential, since they might contain the only documentation of a scientist’s thought processes, ideas and observations, filling in gaps on missing or poorly documented specimens and ideas. They may record information that is otherwise hard to deduce from the specimens alone, which can be vital for scientific research (Rinaldo et al. 2013). In order to make the information contained in these types of materials findable and searchable by anyone and from anywhere, it needs to be digitised and transcribed. Transcription projects are time consuming, intellectually intensive, and expensive for an organisation to set up and manage. Crowdsourcing is a sustainable strategy for transcribing large collections and enhancing descriptive metadata. Despite the increasingly prominent role of artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing is still an indispensable part of the future of libraries, museums, and archives because it solves problems, strengthens the sense of community between the users and the public, adds value to the collection, and creates engagement. The value of scientists’ private correspondence as an historical source has been recognised for a long time already, but recently the concept of "correspondence networks," which connect several people into webs of exchange, became distinct objects of historical studies themselves. (Ogilvie 2016). The transcription process started with the use of the AI-powered platform Transkribus, which enables the transcription of handwritten text into machine-readable and searchable texts. The challenges we faced in the transcription are intrinsic to the nature of our project: dealing with old, obsolete hand-written scripts (e.g., old Kurrent in German); letters written by different senders; and letters including different languages. In order to overcome these challenges, we had to use different transcription models for the AI-driven transcription, and rely on various volunteers with different linguistic backgrounds and skills. After the transcription, the letters were uploaded to Goobi Workflow, which is a tool for the management and display odigitisation projects. Transcribing the letters made it possible to extract relevant data from the texts about botanical specimens and their collectors and allowed the linkage of biographical data on Wikidata and Bionomia with specimen data on JACQ and GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). With the use of Transkribus and the help of our volunteers, we were able to transcribe 864 pages and identify 140 senders. Each one of the botanists was linked to their Q-number, which allows the linkage to their biographical data on Wikidata and Bionomia. In various letters, the sender included a botanical specimen and requested help from E. Hackel for its identification. In various cases, thanks to the information contained in the text, we have been able to identify the specimen within E. Hackel’s personal herbarium, deposited at the Natural History Museum of Vienna. Among the senders, we identified 17 Italian scientists. One of the publicly accessible outcomes of the investigation of Hackel’s exchange with the 17 Italians is the online exhibition on the Europeana platform in an English*1 and Italian*2 version. A second result was the curated story of E. Hackel and his 17 Italian correspondents by the Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations (TETTRI) project in the form of a curated website*3, which links their biographical data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Bionomia, and visuals from Wikimedia. Furthermore, the letters are publicly available for consultation together with their transcription*4 via Trankribus*5 sites. This contribution will provide an insight into the possibilities of extracting data from natural history collections and interlinking them to implement their usability and accessibility for research institutions and the general public.

The bITEM project carried out at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHMW) and the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science (VIAS) of the University of Vienna explores new ways of digitally documenting and disseminating museum objects, their contexts and biographies. With the aim of enhancing access and interpretation, the project addresses challenges of presenting complex histories of museum objects beyond physical displays. Using an interdisciplinary approach, bITEM combines methods and concepts such as 3D scanning and material semiotics with CIDOC CRM and the open-source database system OpenAtlas. The project focuses on five diverse case studies from the NHMW's collection, offering insights into how these objects’ spatial, social, and chronological contexts can be mapped and presented more holistically. The resulting openly accessible web application ( bitem.at ) provides interactive tools, 3D models, timelines, and network graphs. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of combining traditional research methods and archival holdings with advanced digital tools to document and visualise cultural as well as natural heritage objects in novel ways. This approach enhances public access while also serving as a valuable research data resource, establishing a model for future projects in digital humanities and cultural heritage preservation that could select and instrumentalise parts of these tools according to their own prerequisites and requirements. Thus the bITEM project highlights the potential for interdisciplinary, digital approaches to enrich the understanding and accessibility of museum objects in general.

The Koban сulture is one of the most prominent cultural phenomena in the Caucasus region. Its materials are kept in many European museums and are the subject of interest of a wide scientific community. The Koban assemblages stored in the Vienna Natural History Museum are among the most significant museum collec-tions of the Caucasian antiquities in Europe. This collection was acquired in the 19th century by Franz Heger, director of the anthropological and ethnographical department of the Museum, and includes more than 30 representative burial complexes with highly informative artefacts of the eponymous site Koban necropolis. These data are not yet known to researchers. The assemblages from Vienna are unique, because they belonged to the elite members of the society, whose burials included valuable grave goods and burial costume elements. This makes the collection in Vienna a key site to be considered for research questions re-lated to the culture and history of the Central Caucasus between the 10th and 5th centuries BC. The followingarticle is devoted to the analysis of one of the most interesting finds from the Koban cemetery — a bronze pin decorated with the cast figure of a horseman discovered in the burial No. 1 (1884)

Rudolf Sturany, the curator of molluscs of the Natural History Museum of Vienna between the late 19th and early 20th century described 21 species of bivalves from the Red Sea collected by the pioneering expeditions of the vessel “Pola” which took place between 1895 and 1898. We here list and illustrate the type material of these species, provide the original descriptions, a translation into English, and curatorial and taxonomic comments. All species are illustrated in colour and with SEM imaging. To stabilize the nomenclature, we designate lectotypes for Gastrochaena weinkauffi, Cuspidaria brachyrhynchus, and C. dissociata, whose type series contained specimens belonging to other species. This paper concludes the series on the type specimens of marine molluscs described by Sturany from the “Pola” expeditions.

The “Pola” expeditions were the first to explore the deep Eastern Mediterranean Sea in the 1890s. They remained the most intense surveys in that area for a century and constitute today a fundamental baseline to assess change in the basin, whose fauna is still inadequately described. Solid taxonomic foundations for the study of deep-sea organisms are needed and we here contribute by revising the name-bearing types of mollusc species introduced by Rudolf Sturany on the basis of the “Pola” material from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea stored in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Sturany introduced 15 names (Marginella occulta var. minor Sturany, 1896 shall not be considered as the introduction of a new name). He described and established two manuscript names by Monterosato: Jujubinus igneus and Pseudomurex ruderatus. The genus Isorropodon was also introduced together with its type species I. perplexum. For each name, we list the available type material, provide the original description and a translation into English and illustrate the specimens in colour and with SEM imaging.

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography

Gero Kurat (1938–2009)

Ontogeny/growth of (sub)modern brown bear (Ursus arctos) skeleton: A guideline to appraise seasonality for cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) sites?