![]() ![]() ![]() The same cannot be said, however, when it comes to the laws or legal understanding of the local population in the area of the excavation-an aspect of the case that unfortunately cannot be examined in depth in this essay due to the lack of any preliminary studies in legal ethnology. This means that the acquisition of the fossils was carried out in accordance with existing German law. In the case of the Brachiosaurus brancai, the area surrounding the find site was declared as “unclaimed land” in the run-up to the excavation and seized by the colonial state as “crown land”-a means of seizing land for colonialist economic and settlement purposes introduced in 1895. One of the ambiguities surrounding the provenance of natural-history objects from colonial contexts is that they were often obtained in unclear legal circumstances. It was excavated before World War I in the former colony of German East Africa and transferred to Berlin’s natural history museum, the Natural History Museum, not only for the purposes of study and education but also to serve as a piece of colonial and nationalistic propaganda and play a role in scientific and museum policy-making. The focus here is on a scientific object, the skeleton of a Late Jurassic dinosaur, the Brachiosaurus brancai (renamed as Giraffatitan brancai in 2009 ), which as a pars pro toto represents the spoils of a paleontological expedition. This contribution deals with the area of natural history, a field which to date has remained outside the focus of the research and debates surrounding looted art and the theft of cultural assets and has scarcely featured as a topic in the history of remembrance. 04/10/19 The Brachiosaurus brancai in the Natural History Museum Berlin A Star Exhibit of Natural History as a German and Tanzanian Realm of Memory? ![]()
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