Opgeraapt Opgevist Uitgehakt
In 'Grabbed Up, Fished Out,' the Natural History Museum Rotterdam presents a unique overview of fossils from Dutch soil. The exhibition takes the visitor back in time, from 500-million-year-old tubular sandstone from Drenthe and 70-million-year-old sharks and sea urchins from the Limburg Cretaceous, to the relatively young skeletal remains of the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed cat, and beluga whale fished up from the North Sea. These and other magnificent fossils—masterpieces from Dutch museum collections and private collections—provide a picture of our prehistory that is nowhere else on display as completely.
The Netherlands is very rich in fossils, but only a few people know that. We do not need to go abroad to find traces of the distant past. The oldest fossils found in the Netherlands are more than half a billion years old! These are chunks of sandstone with crawl marks, originating from the Hondsrug in Drenthe. Two such chunks can be seen in Rotterdam. Furthermore, corals and trilobites over 400 million years old are on display, as well as fossil leaves, tree trunks, roots, and insects from the Carboniferous period from the Limburg coal mines, skeletal remains and footprints of reptiles from a quarry near Winterswijk (230 million years old), and magnificent sharks and sea urchins from the Limburg Cretaceous (70 million years ago). The showpiece is an early 19th-century cast of the Mosasaurus, the original fossil of which was taken from Maastricht to Paris by the French army in 1795.
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Until 31 December
Rotterdam Coffee Fest celebrates Rotterdam’s coffee culture
Rotterdam Coffee Fest returns from 5 to 8 November for its second edition. It will feature a more extensive programme, *De Doelen* as a new venue, and four days of coffee culture across Rotterdam.
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