How a Berlin museum journal grew into the internationally cited Fossil Record

Every scientific journal has an origin story, but few trace their lineage back to the very nucleus of a university founded in 1810. Fossil Record, the palaeontological journal published today by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, began not under its current name but as one branch of a deliberately unified publishing experiment. A new historical account by researchers at the museum, published in the journal itself, reconstructs the bureaucratic negotiations, departmental rivalries and quiet editorial diplomacy that transformed a small in-house publication into an internationally cited scientific venue. The story is a case study in how institutional identity, funding politics and naming decisions shape the visibility of science itself.

The roots of the museum reach back to the founding of the Universität zu Berlin in 1810, whose collections in mineralogy, zoology and palaeontology formed the seed of what would become one of the world’s great natural history institutions. Geosciences were represented from the start by the mineralogist Christian Samuel Weiss. In 1889 the collections moved from the university’s main building at Unter den Linden 6 to Invalidenstrasse 43, the museum’s address to this day. Only three departments were installed in the new building: Mineralogy, Geology and Palaeontology, and Zoology. For the next four decades palaeontology dominated the geosciences there, until the arrival of the tectonic geologist Hans Stille shifted the emphasis toward geology in the broader sense.

The Department of Geology survived the Second World War, but it did not survive the university reform of the German Democratic Republic in 1968, when it lost its independence as a department. The curatorships continued to exist within the Humboldt Universität, the postwar name of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität. After German reunification in 1990, three scientific departments were reestablished at the museum: Palaeontology, Mineralogy and Zoology. Palaeontology was reconstituted as Palaeobiology, and, uniquely for Germany, given teaching duties in the Department of Biology of the Humboldt Universität. The reasoning was pragmatic: classical geology and palaeontology already existed at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and applied geology at the Technische Universität, so the museum’s palaeontologists would anchor their discipline in biology instead.

All three departments belonged to the Humboldt Universität, with one of the three directors serving as general director of the museum. The mineralogist Dieter Stöffler held that rotating role in the first years from 1993 to 1999, followed by the palaeontologist Hans-Peter Schultze from 1999 to 2004. The museum’s budget had to be negotiated among the three directors, and one recurring item concerned publications. The Department of Zoology published three scientific journals: the Mitteilungen aus der Zoologischen Sammlung des Museums für Naturkunde in Berlin since 1898, the Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift since 1857, and the Annalen für Ornithologie since 1977. The other two departments published nothing of their own.

The Department of Palaeontology had a strong interest in changing that deficiency. Its researchers wanted a venue for monographs and thematic volumes, such as one dedicated to the famous Tendaguru dinosaur locality in Tanzania, whose fossils had been collected before the First World War. The Department of Mineralogy, by contrast, preferred not to publish in an in-house journal. The director of Zoology, Ulrich Zeller, was willing to integrate the Annalen für Ornithologie with the Mitteilungen aus der Zoologischen Sammlung, and as a consequence basic funding became available for a geoscience journal. The palaeontologists seized the opportunity.

During the discussions over a name for the new geoscience journal, director Stöffler argued for a corporate appearance: all three journals of the museum would share the common title Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, meaning Communications from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, distinguished only by subtitles. The palaeontological journal became the Geowissenschaftliche Reihe, the zoological journal the Zoologische Reihe, and the entomological journal retained the name Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift. In 1998 the first volume appeared, and the museum’s palaeontologists finally had a journal of their own.

From the beginning, the editors pursued an internationalization strategy with two technical pillars: opening the journal to authors outside the museum and publishing mainly in English. Managing editor Gloria Arratia worked hard toward that goal, approaching and inviting colleagues beyond the museum’s walls and explaining the advantages of publishing there. The numbers show the strategy worked: a little more than half of the authors in the early years were not members of the Palaeontology Department. On the other side, assistant editor Petra Keßling helped old colleagues from the GDR adapt to modern publication requirements, apart from continuing to publish in German. From volume 1 in 1998 until volume 8 in 2005, 97 papers appeared under the Mitteilungen banner. Volume 2 contained 14 papers on fossils from Tendaguru, and volume 5 was a Festband celebrating the 65th birthday of department director Hans-Peter Schultze with 21 papers.

The decisive technical modernization came with volume 8 in 2005, when the new managing editor Dieter Korn prepared the journal for acceptance in the citation index, with articles assigned a digital object identifier and made available online. With volume 9 in 2006, the journal appeared in two issues per year under a new title: Fossil Record, a name suggested by palaeontologist Wolfgang Kiessling. Starting with volume 11 in 2008, the journal adopted a new color and a changing design from issue to issue. The zoological journal received a parallel rebranding as Zoosystematics and Evolution. The corporate umbrella title was finally dropped when the journals moved to the new publisher Pensoft, in 2014 for the Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Zoosystematics and Evolution, and in 2021 for Fossil Record itself.

The trajectory of Fossil Record reflects broader shifts in scientific publishing over the past quarter century. What began as a museum house organ, constrained by a German-language corporate identity and a largely local readership, deliberately retooled itself for the international citation economy: English as the primary language, DOIs for every article, indexed issues, and a flexible visual design that signaled modernity. The result, as the new account documents, is a journal that has developed from an in-house publication with international contributions into an internationally well cited journal. For palaeontologists, the story is a reminder that the fossil record of science itself, the paper trail of institutions, budgets and journal titles, can be as revealing as any specimen locked in stone.

Subject of Research: History of science

Article Title: The start of the scientific journal ‘Fossil Record’

Article References: Schultze, H.-P. (2024). The start of the scientific journal ‘Fossil Record’. Fossil Record, 27(3), 295-297. https://doi.org/10.3897/fr.27.141907

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/fr.27.141907

Keywords: start, scientific, journal, Fossil, Record, scientific research