Special exhibition “Urpferd 2.0” in Hamburg and Bonn

©Jonas Lauströer, Amir Andikfar, Martin Fischer

 

What might the original horse have looked like? Was its coat spotted or striped? How did the smaller, forest-dwelling relative of our modern horses move? The special exhibition “Urpferd 2.0” gets to the bottom of these questions. The show, which includes original fossils and virtual reconstructions, will be on display at the Geological-Palaeontological Museum in Hamburg from 17 August 2021 to 23 January 2022. Afterwards, the special exhibition will move to our LIB location in Bonn, to the Museum Koenig.

110 years ago, workers in the Messel mine near Darmstadt came across the first prehistoric horse while excavating rocks that were almost 50 million years old. In the following 50 years, almost 70 more or less complete prehistoric horse skeletons were recovered from this most important site in the world for these ungulates. The Messel Pit has been a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site since 1995.

A Propalaeotherium voigti, a 48-million-year-old prehistoric horse stallion recovered there in 2015, has now been examined by researchers using the latest digital techniques. In close cooperation with Prof. Dr. Dr. Martin S. Fischer from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, the Hamburg illustrators Amir Andikfar and Jonas Lauströer have reconstructed the primeval horse in its original form and even made it walk. The special exhibition “Urpferd 2.0” uses high-resolution computer tomographies and 3D animations to play through various possibilities of what the prehistoric horse might have looked like. At the same time, visitors get insights into the science of palaeontology: the recovery of a find, the preparation of fossils and the animation of a primeval horse skeleton.

The special exhibition “Urpferd 2.0” – on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt – complements the special exhibition “Eocene – At the Beginning of Our World”, which is being presented in parallel at the Zoological Museum in Hamburg until 23 January 2022. The Eocene exhibition is a journey back in time to the history of the Earth 56 to 34 million years ago. During this time, ten million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals and birds once again achieved enormous biodiversity in a world where southern Germany was covered by a paratropical forest.

On the redesign of the entrance area in the Geological-Palaeontological Museum

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