Paleontological collections from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1973 - 25 Pfennig

Paleontological collections from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes six multicolored special postage stamps depicting motifs of paleontological collections from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. Paleontological collections from the Museum of Natural History Berlin The fossils from the paleontological collections of the Museum of Natural History Berlin on the special stamps are particularly valuable original witnesses of the history of life on earth. They are both research objects and simultaneously used illustrative material in the educational work of the museum. The Museum of Natural History Berlin - an institution of the Humboldt University - preserves, maintains and extends, among other natural history collections, the largest paleontological collection of the GDR with about 15 million objects. 25-pfennig value: Permian fern, Botryopteris Just a few years ago, a lay explorer discovered these ferns on an old coal-mine in the Döhlen basin near Dresden. The find - a sterile frond part of the old fern Sphenopteris (Botryopteris) - brought important new knowledge about the distribution and structure of this group of plants with the simultaneously discovered fertile (sporanga-bearing) fronds. They are fern plants of shrubby growth whose leaves were still spatially branched. The plants grew in flooded bogs along with other ferns, horsetail and wedge-leaf plants of the lower Permian.