Raw materials collections at the NMB
Overview
Introduction
The raw materials collection at the NMB comprises over 4100 unprocessed, larger sediment samples, that were assembled by scientists and members of the NMB during expeditions, congress field trips, or special field campains. The material comes from European sites and to a large degree from Caribbean areas. The purpose of these collections is the preservation of prime reference materials from stratigraphically or micropaleontologically outstanding sections, such as stratotype sections or microfossil type locations. In this perspective the collections were gathered together in order to document and improve the development of geological time scales and biostratigraphic correlation schemes. The earliest of these bulk sediment samples with material from the Cretaceous Globotruncana helvetica zone type locality date back to 1945, in connection with the dissertation of H.M. Bolli on stratigraphic sections in the Helvetic nappes. Most collection activity occurred during the 1960ies through 1980ies, when museum members attended numerous micropaleontological and stratigraphic conferences. During this time many stratigraphically classical European Paleogene trhrough Neogene sites were visited by Hans Schaub, H.P. Luterbacher, Ch. Kapellos, John Saunders, Peter Jung, and sampled. A large portion of the Caribbean areas were sampled by Hans Kugler, John Saunders and Peter Jung for biostratigraphic purposes, or during the 1990ies in context of the Dominican Republic Project and the succeeding Panama Paleontology Project (PPP). After 2000 the museum's field sampling activity ceased due to changing paleontological research focus of the NMB. Until 2014 raw material collections were stored in the cellars of the NMB, either in the "Jurakeller (Caribbean collections "Barbados") or in the K1 cellar (the other raw materials collections). In 2014 the raw materials collection had to be relocated and a new home was found in the City's new storing warehouse Spenglerpark in Münchenstein. During this occasion, the raw materials, which usually entered the NMB in the sequence of collection times, could be re-organized and ordered into thematic blocks. For this purpose, the individual sample containers of the entire collection were quick-labelled with NMB-PAL relocation numbers, either in blue (as collections were previously arranged in K1) or in red (as collections were previously arranged in the Jurakeller).