Station: [8] Botany

Dust catchers, or the very foundation of science?

For a long time, herbaria, that is, collections of pressed plants, were regarded as decorative extras at best. Yet they provide important evidence of biological diversity!

The examples of dried plants on show here are from the Natural History Society's herbarium, which contains some 45,000 specimens. The history of this plant collection goes back more than 200 years. The oldest specimen, meaning the oldest plant collected, dates back to 1803, when Nuremberg was still a free imperial city!

Herbaria are research collections and often provide the only reliable evidence for former and present occurrences of species. For example, they form the most reliable basis for the compilation of Red Lists. Often, these scientific collections even provide clues that may lead to the discovery of previously unrecognised species. For example, the Natural History Society’s herbarium helped to verify the existence of several endemic occurrences of the meal berry which are only found in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate and nowhere else in the world. Discovering new species in biological collections is not even a particularly rare event.