In 2020, the municipality of Berlare (Oost-Vlaanderen) acquired a large collection of Pleistocene remains from the former Nieuwdonk quarry. The fossils were collected between 1973 and 1978 by private collector and local resident Benedikt Timmerman. Two decades later, the collection found a new home in the offices of the DDS-VERKO intermunicipality. Today, after another 20 years, DDS-VERKO donated the entire collection to the municipality of Berlare, who then contacted Palaeontologica Belgica for an inventory of all the present specimens.
Between 12 and 17 April, the collection will be the focal point of a large restoration project at the ‘Stroming’ cultural center in the town of Berlare. During a second stage, a thorough inventory will be made to log all the objects for future scientific research and protect the collection as a whole.
Unique palaeontological heritage
The Nieuwdonk collection is an important scientific asset for the study of Pleistocene mammals in the Schelde basin of the Flemish Valley. During the 1990s this collection was already (partially) included in the scope of an osteometric study carried out by dr. Mietje Germonpré (Germonpré 1993a). A specific article on the mammal assemblage of Nieuwdonk appeared some years prior (Germonpré & Ervynck 1988), but apart from a few mentions in other papers (Germonpré, 1993b; Hellemond, 2017) the mammal assemblage from Berlare did not receive a lot of interest from the (inter)national paleontological community. Until 2020, when the decision was made to open up this paleontological collection for scientific research and touristic purposes.
