PLANT COLLECTIONS
Since 2021, our plant collection has been completely reorganized, clearly arranged and labeled. The most important plants come from the Neuewelt site in Münchenstein. These finds from the Late Triassic have been worked on since Adolphe Brongniart, Oswald Heer and Fritz Leuthardt. The finds from the Oligocene Septarian Clay of the Basel region and the beautiful leaf impressions from the Miocene site of Öhningen at Lake Constance are an important part in our plant collection as well.
The first part of the collection contains the so-called thallophytes. These are mainly lime-forming algae. You can also find here the oldest fossils in our collections: Stromatolites from Greenland that are about 1,700 million years old.
The land plants come from all over the world. About 1'000 drawers of them are classified according to their age and according to their origin. In terms of numbers, the most important are the plants from the Carboniferous, Triassic, Oligocene and Miocene. Among the Triassic plants, silicified wood is also found in the Miocene Bois de Raube Formation of the Delsberg Basin. The Triassic woody remains were eroded from sediments of the Vosges Mountains about 12 million years ago and shipped southward.
