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More pictures from the Museum:

We found a Coturnix:

Enormous insects:

Linnaeus, Ernst Mayr and Charles Darwin:

Comments

#1 HP
May 4, 2008

What’s that impossible-looking thing? The one that looks like an insect with four compound eyes on a giant stalk coming out of its head?
#2 Coturnix
May 4, 2008

It’s some species of cicada. I guess entomological readers can pitch in an help with the exact Latin name.
#3 bill
May 4, 2008

The body looks like a cicada; the head looks vaguely familiar but maybe that was just a nightmare I had sometime.

The people to ask are here.
#4 themadlolscientist
May 5, 2008

So……… a flash of enlightenment?

And that cicada, or whatever it is, looks like an alien invader from a 50s monster/sci fi movie. Cool!
#5 Juuro
May 5, 2008

One thing that has stuck in my mind that I learned in this museum: aardvark is an ungulate. A lovely phrase.
#6 Juuro
May 5, 2008

Ah, found it. I had snapped a picture of both the exhibit label as well as the wax effigy. That alien invader cicada was named Bocydium globulare. The function of the globes was said to be unknown; in an adult they are hollow.
#7 Bjoern brembs
May 5, 2008

This is currently one of the best museums I know in Berlin! Good for you to have had a chance to see it while you were here.
#8 Christopher Waldrop
May 8, 2008

I love the pictures of the aardvark. They’re such funny animals to me. I know they’re anteaters and not related to either pigs or rabbits, but it’s as though nature said, “Let’s make a pig with rabbit ears…and a big long tail!”