Sammlung Paläomammalogie

Palaeomammalogy

Collection

Fossil Small Mammals

The Fossil Small Mammals Collection is part of the Section Palaeomammalogy since 2018. The collection was established by Dr. Gerhard Storch in the 1960s and curated for by the Section Mammalogy.

The collection of fossil small mammals comprises more than 62,000 catalogued and digitally registered specimens, mainly teeth, skulls, and postcranial elements of Neogene small mammals such as rodents, insectivorans, bats, and lagomorphs.

Significant parts of the fossil mammal collection are Mio-Pliocene faunas from Germany, especially the Mayence basin, Wetterau (Hesse), and Frankfurt region. Important Pleistocene faunas were collected in Rhine-Hesse, northern Hesse, and Lower Saxony. Abundant material also comes from the Aegean Islands (e.g., Chios and Kalymnos, Greece) and Anatolia (Turkey).

The collection also houses an extensive number of casts of type specimens housed in other institutions.