Of Striped Grunters and Brush-toothed Lizardfishes

In 2021, we received an offer we could not pass up: an extensive collection of 858 marine fish skeletons. Known internally as the “Torke Collection,” the collection comes from Dr. Wolfgang Torke, who earned his Ph.D. in Prehistory and Early History at the University of Tübingen in 1978 with a dissertation titled “Fish Remains as Sources of Ecology and Economy in the Stone Age of Southwest Germany.” For this purpose and for subsequent research projects in Southwest Asia, he built up a private comparative ichthyological collection. Wolfgang Torke acquired some of the fish at local fish markets, but he also went out to sea with fishermen himself, allowing him to set aside many specimens for his collection immediately after they were caught. To ensure that his collection would remain preserved and accessible to science in the future, he offered his collection of 334 different species from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indo-Pacific to the SPM, which was thus able to expand its collection by nearly 90 species. The collection of European freshwater fish was transferred to the Department of Archaeozoology at the State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments of Baden-Württemberg in Constance.

Today, in 2026, the cataloging of the Torke Collection is still in full swing. The skeletons must be cleaned and degreased before they can be sorted, packed, labeled, and cataloged. These tasks are coordinated by Britta Möllenkamp, technical assistant at the SPM, though she is supported by student assistants. Dorian Lake is currently sorting the cleaned skeletons by anatomical units. He is a bachelor’s student in Earth Sciences at LMU and TUM and is describing anatomical differences between closely related fish species in his thesis. We wish him every success with his bachelor’s degree and hope that the experience he is gaining from the detailed and sometimes tedious sorting of the small fish bones will be helpful to him!

From left to right:

Original drawing by Wolfgang Torke; uncleaned fish skeletons; Britta Möllenkamp rinses cleaned skeletons

Cleaned but unsorted skeletons; Dorian Lake sorts a fish skeleton; fish skeleton sorted