Main Research

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At the Muschelkalk Museum, research is accomplished in first line by the museum director or jointly with other researchers. Moreover, every year researchers from other institutions visit the museum for working on specimens held in the collections and integrating them into their research. Research at the Muschelkalk Museum is focused on

  • Systematics, palaeoecology, and evolutionary biology of the Triassic Crinoidea and other echinoderms
  • Palaeoecology and taphonomy of Muschelkalk invertebrates
  • Muschelkalk lithostratigraphy and biostratigraphy
  • History of palaeontology and stratigraphy

In these fields, the output of the Muschelkalk Museum covers more than 250 papers in regional and international scientific and popular scientific journals, chapters in books, field guides, and several books. Many of these publications arose from cooperations with the Sonderforschungsbereich 53 Palaeoecology* at the Institut für Geologie und Paläontologie Tübingen managed by Prof. Adolf Seilacher, with the Steinmann Institut Bonn, with the Subkommission Perm-Trias der Deutschen Stratigraphischen Kommission, with the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, the Field-Museum Chicago, the former Yichang Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, and other geological and palaeontological institutes and museums in different countries.