The colourful crawling - magnificent beetles within reach

They are truly magnificent to look at – the 96 jewel beetles of the genus Buprestidae, Julodinae that, since the beginning of the year, can not only be gazed at but also purchased as a poster in the museum shop.

These impressively shimmering specimens are among the approximately 15 million insects at the Museum für Naturkunde, most of which, however, are slumbering in insect boxes and thus remain hidden from the museum audience. However, this changed with the idea of Michael Scheuerl in cooperation with the Mediasphere For Nature – the museum’s multimedia application lab.

It all began in 2017 with the hackathon ‘Coding da Vinci’ in Berlin, where the Mediasphere For Nature presented hundreds of these insect boxes as high-resolution scans to the participants. Immediately fascinated by the outstanding colours of the various beetles from all over the world, designer Michael Scheuerl had the idea of first sorting them by colour. The beetles also sparked the interest of the programmers Falko Krause and Olivier Wagener from shoutr labs, so that the three of them started the project together as Team Haxorpoda. Falko and Olivier developed algorithms for colour sorting, as well as various tools, for example for cutting out individual specimens from insect box scans or for designing individual boxes by colour, shape and type. Michael himself dared to do this by hand and selected 96 of the most impressive beetles from the insect box scans and then arranged them by colour for his beetle poster. With their overall performance, Team Haxorpoda scored at the final event of the hackathon and won the award ‘Funniest Hack’.

Right after the Coding da Vinci hackathon, Mediasphere For Nature stood up for the continued use and organised a Coding da Vinci Follow-Up at the Museum für Naturkunde. Together with different participant groups of the hackathon, ideas, especially for the further development of the poster project, were collected.

Thus, the poster was subsequently enhanced and Michael added an information sheet, which now shows an original insect box and leads to a blog post by Michael on the Mediasphere website via QR code. In addition, Mediasphere For Nature organised the inclusion of the magnificent poster in the selection of the museum shop, where it has been available since the beginning of 2019 as well as online. For this purpose, Michael even rolled and packed each individual beetle poster himself and brought it to the museum shop.

But the poster cannot only be found in the museum shop, it also accompanies an article on the MfN website about the live digitisation of insects that can be observed in the museum. Furthermore, it was used as a background for an interview by ‘sterntv’ with the internationally renowned biologist Dave Goulson on the Day of Insects on March 21, 2019. In the spirit of the free use of open cultural data, Michael, with the help of Wikimedia Germany, also succeeded in making the beetle poster freely available to everyone on the Wikimedia Commons page since June 2019. Currently, he is already working on the implementation of another poster. The secret stars this time are: snails.

Michael’s project is an example of how the cooperation with the Mediasphere For Nature can lead to many different ways of using digital media of the Museum für Naturkunde. The high-resolution insect scans also show that even if many of the objects in the collection are not part of the exhibition area, they can still find their way into the public through creative and innovative ideas.