Arietites
Arietites is a typical large sub-Jurassic ammonite genus of the Central European Sinemurium. The Friederike iron ore mine in the Bündheim district of Bad Harzburg has produced a large number of beautiful, sometimes very large individuals. Mining of the fossil-rich iron ores of marine-sedimentary origin began in the middle of the 19th century and ended in 1963. The object shown here is part of the Geosciences Museum's palaeontological collection of several million pieces.
Ribbon ore
The ribbon ore on display is part of the Geosciences Museum's deposit collection. It comes from the former Grund lead-zinc mine (Germany's last producing ore mine until operations ceased in 1992). Mineralisation of the Bad Grund ore veins took place through hydrothermal solutions during resin folding from the late Upper Carboniferous to the lower Permian. The minerals calcite (white), zinc blende (grey-brown), chalcopyrite (golden-yellow) and galena (silver-grey) are dominant.
Campo del Cielo meteorite
The meteorite collection of the Geosciences Museum is one of the oldest and historically most significant of its kind. The earliest additions date from the late 18th century. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach received a sample from the scattered field of the piece shown here in the early 19th century through Joseph Banks. The Campo del Cielo meteorite comes from an already differentiated body in space with a shell structure similar to our Earth. It consists almost exclusively of the elements iron and nickel and therefore comes from the core area of such an object.
Calcite
Calcite is the mineral with the greatest variety of forms. The St. Andreasberg ore district, which was one of Germany's most important silver mining areas between the 16th and 19th centuries with several hundred mines, produced extraordinarily large and magnificent calcite specimens during active mining, which were already a sought-after collector's item in the 18th century. A large number of such pieces are already included in the Göttingen "Catalogus Musei Academici" from 1778.
Geoscience Museum, Collection + Geopark
The collections of the Geosciences Centre of the University of Göttingen consist of more than a dozen sub-collections in the fields of palaeontology, mineralogy, geology and meteoritics. With more than four million objects and series, including countless originals relating to scientific publications of the past almost 300 years, they are among the most important holdings in Europe. Today, they represent the fourth largest geoscientific collection in Germany.
