Collections at our Locations

Founded in 1817 by the Senckenberg Natural History Society in Frankfurt am Main.

Size: 1,500,000 specimens.

Focus: worldwide. Main areas of interest: Hesse, Europe, Mediterranean region, Mid-Atlantic Islands, West Africa, Neotropics; Poaceae, corticolous, crustose lichens of the Holarctic; diatoms.

Important collections: A. Aschenborn, J. Becker, W. Boege, K.-P. Buttler, M. Dürer, J. G. A. Forster, J. R. Forster, J. B. C. W. Fresenius, G.W. Freyreiss, J. A. Futschig, G. Gärtner, M. Goldschmidt, H. Hupke, H. Kalheber, R. O. K. Kräusel, D. Korneck, W. Kuls, J. A. Metzler, A. Nieschalk, G. L. Rabenhorst, E. W. P. S. Rüppell, J. Scherbius, L. P. K. Scriba, F. W. Sieber, G. H. K. Thwaites – vgl. auch Index Collectorum.

Founded in 1823 by the Natural History Society of Görlitz.

Size: 376,200 specimens.

Vascular plants and fungi worldwide (Herbarium Generale), special collection: southeastern Germany and neighboring areas of Poland and the Czech Republic (Herbarium Lusaticum); lichens, mosses (worldwide) and Characeae of Europe.

Important collections: J. C. Breutel, E. Wenck und weitere Angehörige der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine (Moose, Flechten, Phanerogamen), F. Gröger (Pilze), J. G. Ch. Lehmann (Lebermoose), G. Zschieschang (Pilze), I. Dunger (Pilze, Phanerogamen), H. Jage (>40.000 phytophathogene Pilze, Phanerogamen), E. Eckardt (Moose), C. G. Mosig, F. A. Schade (Flechten), E. Barber, M. Militzer, H.-W. Otto, R. Peck, H. v. Rabenau (Phanerogamen).

Research station for Quaternary paleontology, founded in 2008 as a reference collection for the study of Quaternary plant remains (macrofossils).

Size: 4,700 specimens.

Flora of Beringia (Yakutia [northeastern Siberia], Alaska) and northern Europe, vascular plants, with a special focus on Arctic, boreal, and steppe plants.

The Haussknecht Herbarium was founded in 1896 by Carl Haussknecht (1838–1903) in Weimar as a private institution.

Size: The Haussknecht Herbarium currently houses approximately 3.5 million plant specimens and is one of the largest herbaria in Europe.

Geological and Mineralogical Collections Dresden

The Museum of Mineralogy and Geology in Dresden is one of Germany’s most important geoscientific research museums. Its collections comprise over 400,000 minerals, fossils, and rocks. With the first mention of collection objects dating back to 1587, the institution is one of the oldest geoscientific institutions in the world and looks back on an eventful museum history. The collections contain numerous types (first descriptions) and originals (researched pieces) of fossils, minerals, and rocks.

Important special collections include the Saxon mineralogical collections and the “Richard Baldauf” collection, the meteorite collection, the collection of Saxon Cretaceous fossils with numerous originals by Hanns Bruno Geinitz, the “Solnhofen limestone” fossil collection, the collection of Tertiary plant fossils, and the collection of building and decorative stones.

The Museum of Mineralogy and Geology boasts numerous treasures and unique items. Representative examples include valuable silver specimens from the historic silver mines in the Ore Mountains (e.g., a specimen from the “Silver Table” of 1477 from Schneeberg, the “Silver Cross” from 1623), a lightning tube over 6 m long from Lusatia, the meteorite from Nenntmannsdorf near Pirna, the unique plant fossil “Raumeria” (Cycadeoidea reichenbachiana), the clutch of a duck-billed dinosaur with 21 eggs, the oyster colony Rastellum carinatum LAMARCK from Dresden-Plauen, the holotype of the Jurassic marine crocodile Stenosaurus bollensis, a female ichthyosaur with embryo (Stenopterygius quadriscissus), and starfish impressions (Stellaster schulzei) from the Upper Cretaceous sandstones of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. The type material from Ernst Kalkowsky’s first description of the terms “stromatolite” and “ooid,” which are now used worldwide, is in the museum’s collections.

Zoological Collections Dresden

With more than 6 million animal specimens, the Museum of Zoology in Dresden is one of the ten largest zoological collections in Germany. The Dresden collections cover the entire globe and are internationally significant, not least because of their great diversity of types. The beetle collection alone, comprising 2 million specimens, contains around 13,500 taxa (species and subspecies) with type specimens (holo-, lecto- or syntypes) that bear their names, representing the “original meters” of the respective taxa. In addition to important global collections, the rich holdings of extinct vertebrate species are particularly noteworthy, including, for example, a skeleton of Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas). The bird and weevil collections are also noteworthy. The ornithological collection, comprising approximately 91,000 specimens, represents about 60% of the approximately 9,000 bird species found worldwide. The weevil collection covers around 20,000 of the 65,000 weevil species found worldwide. In addition to classic zoological collections with alcohol and dry specimens, there is a continuously growing, extensive tissue and blood sample collection for molecular genetic studies with more than 20,000 samples.

The Natural History Museum has extensive scientific collections with a total of over 6 million objects from the fields of zoology, soil zoology, entomology, botany, paleontology, and geology. These collections represent an archive of animate and inanimate nature and document the development of organisms in space and time. They are used by scientists worldwide for taxonomic-systematic, morphological, ecological, conservation, and molecular biological research, among other things. All collection areas have a high degree of digital coverage and are continuously and specifically expanded.

The insect collection of the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute (SDEI) in Müncheberg is one of the largest and most important natural science collections of its kind in Germany. It is an essential part of the complementary international network of biodiversity research.

It currently comprises approximately 3 million specimens in 190,000 species, including types from 22,000 species. The 13,000 boxes of the uniformly structured, well-organized collection are housed in an air-conditioned storage facility in an electronically controlled compact shelving system. The foundation of the collection is made up of special collections from outstanding entomologists, which were mainly acquired by the SDEI as bequests. These include, for example, the KRAATZ (Coleoptera), HORN (Coleoptera: Cicindelinae), LEONHARD (Coleoptera and Lepidoptera), and VON HEYDEN (Palaearctic Coleoptera) collections. Particularly valuable are the collections of SAUTER (1871-1948) from Formosa (approx. 6,000 species, numerous types) and from the DEI expedition to Albania in 1961.

In principle, insects of all orders and from all zoogeographical regions are collected, but the focus is on the orders Coleoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera, and Hymenoptera, which are traditionally processed by SDEI staff. In addition, material on the biology of all insect groups (larvae, pupae, mines, feeding patterns, structures, etc.) is collected and preserved.

With a few exceptions, the collection items, including hemimetabolous insects, are classified in the main collection using standard box sizes according to principles formulated by Walther Horn and documented in catalogs or in the SDEI database.

The SDEI’s type collections have been largely published and are already partially accessible via the Internet. The wealth of types requires the provision of material in an intensive international exchange.

(Third-party funding: National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS) in Taichung, Taiwan)

The SDEI insect collection is renowned for its extensive “Formosa Collection,” consisting of approximately 6,000 species, including numerous types and 2,258 species from Taiwan. These insects were collected by Hans Sauter between 1908 and 1914 (LINK: 1009683 ESAKI 1941.pdf) in Taiwan and donated to the institute. The SDEI gave the Taiwanese specimens to the respective specialists for processing and ensured that the results were published. Because of this history, Taiwan was for a long time the most entomologically researched island in Southeast Asia.

The National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS) in Taichung, Taiwan, signed a cooperation agreement with Senckenberg in 2007. This made it possible to digitize the type material of the Formosa Collection in stages. The results are accessible via the NMNS online database. Entomologists from all over the world can now search online for photographs of the type material for their research without having to borrow them.

Senckenberg manages nine collections at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) at the University of Tübingen. The six paleontological collections have a history spanning more than 200 years and together comprise well over 1 million objects and more than 30,000 published individual items, mostly type material. Fossils from the excavations of such eminent scientists as August von Quenstedt, Ernst Koken, Friedrich von Huene, Otto Schindewolf, Karl Mägdefrau, Alfred Eisenack, and Adolf Seilacher can be examined. The collections also house key paleoanthropological fossils such as the bones of Danuvius guggenmosi (Madelaine Böhme) and hominid teeth from the Bohnerz in the Swabian Alb (Wilhelm von Branco). In seven large exhibition halls, impressive vertebrate skeletons and other fossils are presented in a long-established display, teaching, and research collection, partly in stratigraphic order and in a historicizing ambience.

The Senckenberg Institute for Plant Diversity Jena (SIP) was founded in June 2024 in cooperation with Friedrich Schiller University Jena. At the eighth Senckenberg Institute in Jena, biodiversity change in the Anthropocene – the age shaped by humans – will be comprehensively analyzed using modern and innovative methods in terms of both time and space.

The professorships for Integrative Plant Taxonomy and Functional Plant Biodiversity, already established at the University of Jena, will in future join forces with two new Senckenberg professorships for Ecology and Evolution of Mosses and “Digital Collectomics” to use the collections of the Haussknecht Herbarium in Jena for their research into biodiversity change.
With 3.5 million specimens, the Haussknecht Herbarium is one of the most important herbaria in Europe and is also the largest regional botanical collection in Germany. Through digitization combined with imaging and the incorporation of artificial intelligence and deep learning, through the integration of databases, and through the application of molecular genetic methods, the extensive potential of this unique collection for analyzing biodiversity change can now be leveraged and shared. The aim is to reconstruct biological diversity and its changes and interactions spatially and explicitly over the last century, and to develop forecasts and options for action for the conservation of species diversity.