Experts in Basel have found four plant collections belonging to the two naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin that were thought to be lost. Until now, scientists had assumed that these pocket herbaria were destroyed in Berlin during the Second World War. +Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox With the latest discovery in Basel, it is now clear that at least some of them have been preserved, as the Swiss Natural History Collections Network (Swisscollnet) announced on Tuesday. The pocket herbaria contain 28 dried reference plants, so-called type specimens, which were used by botanists to scientifically describe newly discovered species. The two Basel-based naturalists Paul Sarasin (1856-1929) and Fritz Sarasin (1859-1942) brought back bulging pocket herbaria from their expedition to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. These included plant species that were still unknown at the time and found nowhere else. A bombing in 1943 sparked a fire that destroyed the Berlin ...
