IMIS - Marine Research Groups

The Section Marine invertebrates 3 of the Senckenberg Research Institute houses a wide-ranging collection of bryozoans from the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Arabian seas. the East Asian coastal seas (Philippines, Japan, Hainan/China), the Southern Ocean (New Zealand, Australia), and Antarctica. The collection has been significantly expanded by the donation of about 15,000 specimen boxes of Professor Heinrich Ristedt (Bonn, Germany). The Ristedt -Collection is composed of dried specimens, mounted on match boxes in small plastik containers. We have adopted this practical system to integrate all new collections. The Section´s collection of fossil bryozoans is even larger, since Professor Voigt (1905-2004) has left us with a massive legacy of the wordwide most comprehensive collection of Cretaceous bryozoans. He was one of the greatest ever bryozoologists, a scientist with an 80 year long record of bryozoan publications. His enormous bryozoan collection occupies thousands of cavity slides, and boxes. Although most of the specimens represent the Upper Cretaceous of Northern Europe, there are significant collections from other stratigraphical periods such as the Ordovician (Caradoc) kuckersite (oilshale) deposits from Estonia. Aside from the Voigt legacy, individual benefactions have likewise expanded the variety of fossil bryozoans in our collecton, including Cretaceous bryozoans donated by Ursula Schneemilch (Hannover), and Upper Paleozoic bryozoans, some of them types, given to us by Dr. Andrej Ernst (Kiel).