HALLE: The Geiseltal Collection of Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg

About 50,000 fossil specimens from the Eocene of Geiseltal, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, have been collected and deposited in the Geiseltal Collection at the Center for Natural Science Collections of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Especially rich in vertebrate and beetle fossils, more than two dozen new taxa have been described based on this material. For a century, scientists have meticulously studied and archived these ancient species from about 45 million years ago. All animal fossils of the Geiseltal Fossillagerstatte excavated are kept together in the Geiseltal Collection—some fossilized plants went to Berlin’s natural history museum and elsewhere. The preservation of the specimens is extremely high quality and often three-dimensional, even including microstructure such as iridescent colours in insects and leaf stomata in plants. The Geiseltal Fossillagerstatte was used as the defining fauna of the European Land Mammal Age, the “Geiseltalium” due to the preservation of many key mammalian species during a time of rapid diversification. Today the entire collection is registered by the Federal State of Germany as part of its important national heritage. Internationally well-known fossils are those from the ancestral horses (Propalaeotherium and Eurohippus), the giant flightless bird (Gastornis) and the five different crocodilian genera (Diplocynodon, Allognathosuchus, Bergisuchus, Asiatosuchus and Boverisuchus).