And so after a fruitful yet expensive time in the Kingdom of Mercia, our little troupe buggered off to the Continent for a hearty dose of German hospitality.
This is just a teaser from our first stop, Berlin, where we attended the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. Here a Brachiosaurus towers over the atrium in the Humboldt Museum of Natural History, where the conference reception was held. Owing to our commitment to professionalism we took no other pictures at the meeting, so we'll pick up in Tubingen, our first stop on the post-SVP two week museum spree.
The relationships of Tubingen, Stuttgart, and Berlin, our three German cities. Note that our travel vector was considerably different from this owing to striking German transport employees. It's nice to know that strikes happen outside of South Africa sometimes...
The University of Tubingen houses a magnificient paleontological collection, with everything from dinosaurs to sea lilies. Here I'm standing next to one of their many panels of ammonites.
And this is a panel of sea lilies, or crinoids. These fascinating creatures attach themselves to the substrate (here a log) and send out delicate stalks with filter feeding arms at the end. What's cooler, though, is that THEY'RE STILL ALIVE TODAY. And I didn't know that until I wrote this blog post.
A modern sea lily from the internet.
Although their dinosaurs are nice, I'd have to say that the Tubingen displays of various marine reptiles were some of the most diverse and awe-inspiring that I've ever seen (and then we went to Stuttgart which is a close competitor). These are some plesiosaurs.
But of course, we mostly weren't working up in the nice part of the museum. Blair's standing at the end of one of about 20 aisles that form the bulk of the real collection.
Our next stop along the way was the "Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde Stuttgart," or the State Museum of Natural History. The museum itself is in a strange architectural style, especially for European museums, but this is because the original museum was firebombed in WWII and destroyed (along with quite a few important fossils).
Every morning, we traversed this rather lovely park between our hotel and the museum. The only fault - dickhead bicyclists whizzing past.
We were at the museum for its special exhibit on feathered dinosaurs - here an oviraptorosaur guards its nest.
The main portion of the exhibit has been recently redone, including some fantastic dioramas like this one showing the early evolution of tetrapoda...
...and this one showing a Middle Triassic scene...
...and this one showing the rise of the dinosaurs in the Late Triassic.
Their collections space was well-organized, but I get the sense that the gentle reader may now understand that these things are just sets of drawers, so I will refrain from showing any more pictures of them.
We had a weekend day to devote to cultural enjoyment, so we took the train to the nearby town of Ludwigsburg. On a Sunday, the public squares were full of lively markets and farmer's wares, including these heads of "Klu Klux Kabbage".
But our objective wasn't to purchase cabbage (in fact I was quite full of cabbage at that point), it was to visit this impressive palace, the Residenzschloss, built by Duke Eberhard Ludwig von Württemberg in the early 1700s. It has over 400 rooms, of which we saw less than 100 (no pictures were allowed inside).
The grounds of the Residenzschloss are equally impressive, featuring this mini-castle and many other outbuildings such as an orangerie. Owing to the short, dark days of early winter, most of these structures were closed to the public.
Having unfairly ragged on cabbage, I need to show you some of the better German chow we dined upon. This is an eisbein (or schweinshaxe), basically a brined ham hock that is roasted until the skin turns into crackling. On the left, semmelknoedel, or bread dumplings. On the right, spaetzle, or fresh German pasta.
And just like that, we were back to Berlin, this time to study some dinosaurs. We had a rather ominous start, as it turns out that the backpackers hostel we booked into belonged to a nightclub complex called the "Ball House."
Berlin wears the scars of WWII on its sleeve, and many buildings have facades marred by bullet holes and shrapnel marks, as above.
This is the impressive Berlin cathedral, which sits amongst other beautiful buildings on museum island. As you might expect, a closer look shows a facade marred by bullet holes.
Among the cooler non-dinosaurian exhibits at the Humboldt Museum in Berlin was the fish collection. Fish are commonly preserved like this - in glass jars containing a mix of ethanol and water. Rather than hide their 80,000 jarred specimens away in some attic as most museums do, the Humboldt made all the back walls of the collection out of glass, and now visitors can peer in and see ichthyologists at work (while being kept safely away from all that sweet, sweet ethanol).
The Humboldt houses much of the famous dinosaur collections from the Tendaguru beds in Tanzania. Tendaguru was a Late Jurassic deposit, and at that time dinosaurs were attaining truly massive sizes. Here Kimi is standing next to a shoulder blade of a brachiosaur...
...and Blair is working in the catacombs, surrounded by monstrous pelvi and femora.
...and here's what you've been waiting for. The showcase of the Humboldt Museum is the famous "Berlin Archaeopteryx," an exquisite specimen preserved on a slab of limestone that clearly shows how this "first bird" is a mix of primitive and derived features. In accordance with its iconic status, it's behind bulletproof glass and raking light shines on it for only 30 seconds out of each minute.
...but perhaps what you didn't know is that the Humboldt ALSO harbours this fossil slab of ancient amphibians that look kind of a lot like a bunch of weiners. Strangely, this one isn't behind bulletproof glass.
And with that, I bid you auf wiedersehen!
Sweet!
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