On 18 December 2016, Dutch Paleontologist John de Vos will hold a lecture about the Eugene Dubois collection at the Naturalis Diversity Centre in Leiden.
For more information, please visit our Dutch website.
Dubois collection
Eugene Dubois collected vertebrates at the end of the 19th century in Indonesia. The collection is world famous, because it contains the first fossils (the femur, skullcap and the molar) from Pithecanthropus erectus, nowadays Homo erectus. Besides this, Dubois collected about 40,000-mammal fossil from Sumatra and Java. As there was a discussion about their stratigraphic position, fieldwork is/was carried out in Java, Sumatra, Pakistan and Vietnam. Based on the results of those fieldwork campaigns a new biostratigraphy was developed for Java. As this collection also contains the fossils of pigmy proboscideans (elephants) from Sulawesi and Flores, fieldwork is/was carried out in Sulawesi, Flores and Philippines; all islands with unbalanced endemic island faunas. Every island has its own evolutionary history. Such faunas are also present on the islands of the Mediterranean, like Crete, Kasos, Cyprus etc. On Flores a layer with large Stegodon bones was found together with artefacts. The layer was dated 800.000 years, which indicates that Homo erectuscould cross a water-barrier.
