COBURG: Naturkunde-Museum Coburg—Paleontological Collections

Abstract

The Naturkunde-Museum Coburg was founded in 1844 by Duke Ernst II of Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha and Prince Consort Albert as ‘Herzogliches Naturaliencabinet’. The present museum building has 4800 m² of usable floor space, with 2200 m² for exhibitions, including 13 halls with the following fields: geology, animals of Central Europe and North America, archaeology, ethnology, and museums history. The paleontological collections comprise hundreds of thousands of fossils. About a third of the fossils are from the Jurassic, most of them from the Franconian and Swabian Albs. This is followed by the Triassic (a quarter) with specimens from the wider surroundings of Coburg. The Palaeozoic as well as Cretaceous and Cenozoic are only minor collection parts with 10% each. Important collections are those of Duke Franz Friedrich Anton (1750–1806), including Triassic fish (Semionotus), and petrified wood (Dadoxylon) from the Keuper Group of Coburg and the Reinecke collection (1818) with the type material of Leioceras opalinum etc.

The geoscientific library of the Naturkunde-Museum Coburg has been compiled according to the daily needs of museum work, but the literature of the nineteenth century is also available.