83rd Annual Meeting of the German Society of Mammalogy, Dresden, 13 to 17 September 2009

Jena

2009

Bandaufführung

12600S

204902

The Annual Meeting of the German Society of Mammalogy will be held in Dresden for the second time after 1927 which was actually the first annual meeting of the Society founded in 1926. The meeting was organized by Gustav Brandes at the Zoo and Arnold F. V. Jacobi from the Museum. This year’s meeting will be hosted by Senckenberg Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden, Museum für Tierkunde, since 1.1.2009 part of the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut and Naturmuseum. The collection in Dresden dates back to the 16th century and therefore has a long tradition. Even though several times the collections were severely damaged and reduced, interesting objects have remained. The mammal collection now houses about 25.000 specimens from around the world with a special treasure of specimens from the Indo Malayan Region collected at the end of the 19th century by A. B. Meyer (particularly Chiroptera), but also small interesting collections from other areas several of which have been studied and published by Alfred Feiler. The highlights in the collection are the extinct Thylacinus cynocephalus and a fairly complete skeleton of Hydrodamalis gigas. The section mammalogy in the Museum is cooperating with the Technical University Dresden offering a comprehensive two-week course in Biology and Systematics of mammals for students to give them insights into museum collections, research work and of course basic mammalogy. As the focus of the Technical University is not on classical biology the mammal research group is rather small.