BARBARA MOHR ET AL. 278 HUGO RÜHLE VON LILIENSTERN AND HIS PALAEOBOTANICAL COLLECTION: AN EAST–WEST GERMAN STORY BARBARA A. R. MOHR,* EVELYN KUSTATSCHER,** CORNELIA HILLER* AND GOTTFIED BÖHME* *Museum of Natural History, Invalidenstrasse 43, 10 115 Berlin, Germany barbara.mohr@rz.hu-berlin.de; cornelia.hiller@museum.hu-berlin.de; gottfried.boehme@museum.hu-berlin.de **Naturmuseum Südtirol, Bindergasse 1, 39100 Bozen/Bolzano, Italy evelyn.kustatscher@naturmuseum.it Earth Sciences History v. 27, no. 2, 2008 pp. 278–296 ABSTRACT The ‘Rühle collection’ is one of the largest remaining historical collections of Central European Triassic fossils and is now located at the Berlin Museum of Natural History (MfN). The collector, Hugo Rühle von Lilienstern, a medical doctor who lived in southern Thuringia, was a dedicated palaeontologist. From the 1950s his home and collection area were situated in a region that became the borderland between the two German States. The fate of the collection was thus closely interwoven with East–West German history after World War II. The scientific value of these mostly Middle to Late Triassic Central European fossils and its standing compared to other late Triassic palaeobotanical collections is evaluated. 1. INTRODUCTION The diversity of the Earth’s past faunas and floras is determined by examining the numerous collected specimens and taxa of fossils. Hidden in drawers, often known only to specialists through scientific publications, sometimes only in obscure journals, these collections are nonetheless extremely valuable for future larger scale, quantitative studies that focus on regional and global distributions at particular periods in geological history. In the past comprehensive studies of Triassic floras have been carried out only rarely (Dobruskina 1994), but further work that will focus on vegetation and climate development of the Early Mesozoic is planned. A historic fossil collection that has been valuable in regional and global palaeontological studies is that of the doctor and amateur fossil collector Hugo Rühle von Lilienstern (1882–1946), which was donated four decades ago to the Museum of Natural History (MfN) in Berlin by his widow Marie Rühle von Lilienstern. The Lilienstern collections are primarily from the mid-to-late Triassic terrestrial strata of central Germany, and in addition to valuable and diverse palaeozoological objects they have yielded well preserved and documented plant associations that are still important in scientific research. 2. BIOGRAPHY OF HUGO RÜHLE VON LILIENSTERN At the village of Bedheim, in the hilly landscape of southern Thuringia, not far from the border with Bavaria, Hugo Rühle von Lilienstern (1882–1946) lived in the family’s ancient manor house (see Figure 1). Born into a central German noble family whose history was interwoven with German military history but was also involved with the history of German arts and literature, he decided to combine the family traditions and his own scientific