Enthusiastic, paleontologist Jelle Reumer dwells on a fossil coelacanth. “Look how beautifully prepared those fins are! In any case, this is of course a fascinating animal. A fish that everyone thought was extinct for a long time, until living specimens were suddenly discovered last century. This is one of my favorite fossils here.”
And yet it is difficult to choose in Teylers Museum: the display cases are chock full of fossilized hyena droppings, ammonites and mammoth molars, collected over the course of about two and a half centuries. Founded in 1784, the Haarlem museum (named after philanthropist Pieter Teyler van der Hulst) is one of the first museums in the world: older than the Louvre (1793) and younger than the British Museum (1753). In addition to fossils, there are special stones on display (including the top of Mont Blanc), ingenious inventions (including Thomas Edison’s first generation of light bulbs), first editions (including On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin) and famous paintings (including a self-portrait by Marlene Dumas). “And the architecture of the building alone is worth a visit.”
Jelle Reumer in the Teylers Museum.
Photos: Jagoda Lasota
In Reumer’s latest book, The giant salamanderthe museum plays a leading role. “That could hardly be otherwise, in a book that focuses on the history of paleontology.” He first came there decades ago, as a lecturer at Utrecht University. “Then we were shown around by John de Vos, paleontologist and honorary curator at the museum. The idea for this book arose on a bench here in front of Teylers, while John and I watched the boats passing by on the Spaarne.”
Nowhere can the history of fossils be seen as beautifully as here, Reumer wants to say. And so it’s time for a tour of some fossil masterpieces (and a few fakes).
1The mammoth of Heukelum – Mammuthus primigenius
“Before the reclamation of the Netherlands and the construction of the Afsluitdijk, when the Zuiderzee was still wild and untamed, the Low Countries were regularly flooded: take the Sint-Elizabeth flood of 1421 and the Flood of 1953. Catastrophes that sowed death and destruction, but also brought fossils to light, for example a giant mammoth skull near the Betuwe town of Heukelum, on the banks of the Linge. It was exposed on January 26, 1820 during a dike breach.
“We have now become a bit spoiled in the Netherlands when it comes to mammoth fossils, but at the time it was very special. At first the skull was traveled to fairs, but in 1824 it was offered for sale. The curator of Teylers Museum at the time, Martinus van Marum, was eager to make the purchase, but the museum directors did not cooperate – they found the method of bidding, with sealed notes to the notary, inappropriate.
“Van Marum had such a row with the management that none of them would attend his funeral later, in 1837. But he still bought the skull: not for Teylers Museum but for the Cabinet of Natural Sciences of the Dutch Society of Sciences, on the other side of the Spaarne. Only when that Cabinet was dissolved, in 1866, did the mammoth move to the Spaarne. In the past, mammoth skulls were also thought to be Cyclops skulls – the hole in the middle would then have been the eye socket – but Van Marum knew better.”
2The Flood Man – Homo diluvii testis et theoscopos
“Apart from those real ‘floods’ in the Betuwe and elsewhere, in earlier centuries there were quite a few people who believed in the Biblical Flood Man, including the Swiss physician Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, born in 1672. As was often the case at that time, he had In addition to medicine, he had a lot of other interests, including geology and zoology, and he was quite religious. In all his zeal he determined to prove that the divine Flood had really occurred, and he saw signs of it everywhere, including petrified fish.
“But one German discovery made his heart beat faster: that of a hominid fossil. The Flood Man, judged Scheuchzer. Or as he wrote in his publication in 1726: Homo diluvii testis et theoskopos. The man who experienced the flood and saw God. There was nothing more to be seen than a twisted spine and a skull.
“Not everyone believed Scheuchzer’s theory – Van Marum, for example, thought it was a fossil catfish. But clarification only came in 1811, when the famous paleontologist Georges Cuvier and his assistant Charles Léopold Laurillard visited Teyler’s Museum. Cuvier had achieved world fame as a paleontologist at the end of the eighteenth century because he was the first to find fossil evidence for the theory that animals could become extinct. Under his and Van Marum’s supervision, Laurillard chiseled away some more stone around the spine of the fossil and voilà, amphibian-like legs emerged. The Flood Man was not a human but a giant salamander.”
3The Maastricht monster – Mosasaurus hoffmannii
“There is another fossil that connects Cuvier to Haarlem and that is the Mosasaurus hoffmannii – the Mesh Lizard. Named after Johann Leonard Hoffmann, the Maastricht owner of a cabinet of naturalists. Hoffmann was the first to write about the striking skulls that two other Maastricht collectors had in their possession and which he wrongly labeled as fossil crocodile heads.
“Both skulls came from the limestone quarry in Sint-Pietersberg, south of Maastricht. The first, found in 1764, was purchased by Van Marum. But the other, from 1778, was taken to Paris by French revolutionary troops as spoils of war. According to tradition, the skull was exchanged ‘for 600 bottles of good wine’, but that is not true.
“In any case: it was partly thanks to the mosasaur that Cuvier realized that species could become extinct. Although not with the copy from Teylers Museum, but with the Paris copy, which is still there, in the natural history museum. Wrongly, according to some Dutch paleontologists: they believe that the stolen fossil should be returned to Maastricht. This is a current topic, especially at this time, when there is also a lot of discussion about returning the Dubois collection to Indonesia. Dubois discovered prehistoric man in 1891 Homo erectusthe fossils of which are located in Naturalis in Leiden. Casts of it can be seen here in Teylers Museum.”
4The Piltdown Man & the Lügensteine
Photos: Teylers Museum
“With those casts of Homo erectus In the display case you can also see one of the fake fossils that Teylers Museum has: the Piltdown man. Neatly with a sign stating that it is a counterfeit. The English were quite grumpy when it came to paleoanthropology around 1900: the Germans had found a Neanderthal, the French had their Cro-Magnon man and the Dutch had their Homo erectus. In Britain they also wanted an extinct hominid.
“And sure enough, a fossil primeval man suddenly appeared in 1908 near the town of Piltdown, in Sussex. It wasn’t until 1953 that it was exposed as a fake fossil, featuring the lower jaw of a chimpanzee. It was never known who was behind the deception. Some even mention the name of Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Other fake fossils in Teylers include the Lügensteine of Johann Bartholomarus Adam Beringer, a German doctor who thought he had found very beautifully preserved fossils. They look a bit like those figures you can make with plastic molds in the sandbox: a miniature turtle, a shell, a fish. During his lifetime, Beringer’s fossils were exposed as fakes. Some say he was framed by jealous colleagues, but I think he was hoping for a lucrative business and started forging himself.”
5The primeval bird – Archeopteryx lithographica
“The most famous fossil in Teylers is the Archaeopteryx: the missing link between the dinosaurs and today’s birds. That transitional form is the fossilized equivalent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the very first fossil bird. This fossil was found in 1855, making it the oldest discovered Archaeopteryx. If you look closely you can even see feathers.
“Of course a transition is always gradual and the choice between reptile or bird is in a sense arbitrary. But I would say: Archaeopteryx was indeed a bird.”