Revisiting the “Ralum Project”: Molluscs collected by Friedrich Dahl in 1896-1897 for the Museum of Natural History Berlin

“Give me a museum and I will fill it”. The first German Tropical Research Station at Ralum, Bismarck Archipelago, 1896-1897, in context of collecting for the Museum of Natural History Berlin

“…As we have shown before (Schmitt & Glaubrecht 2012) the vast amount of material from Ralum that arrived in Berlin attracted quite differential interest in the individual custodies of the museum. For example, in some of them such as the herpetology and the ornithology departments, Dahl's material was the basis for many new species descriptions and publications (e.g.…”

“…Here the Ralum material seemed to be left largely unnoticed for over a century. Except for some specimens, large parts of the Ralum collection had neither been sorted nor identified and, therefore, also not been integrated into the main collection before we present authors recently caught up with this routineous task (see Schmitt & Glaubrecht 2012). Measured against the effort Dohrn and Parkinson expended to not only plan and built but also run the Ralum research station, the neglectance such as for example in the Malacology department are to be considered a serious failure of museum practice in particular and scientific endeveour in general.…”

How to become museum director: lessons from the decisive years 1883 to 1887 and Karl August Möbius' appointment at the Zoological Museum in Berlin

“…In the course of archival researches into another important historical episode of the Berlin museum (Schmitt 2010), thus more accidentally, we found a new and yet untapped source from which it is possible now to reconstruct some of the decisive events during the crucial years 1883 to 1887. In the archive of the Stazione Zoologica Napoli in Italy there is evidence of a correspondence between Karl Maebius ( Fig.…”