3019) Fox Whale, Woolly Mammoth and Sabre-toothed Cat, Netherlands: "Prehistoric Animals Stamp Series": Post NL (Netherlands Post) has issued the first three Stamp Sheets in a series of 12 Stamp sheets featuring extinct animal species, fossils of which were found in the Netherlands: Date of Stamp Sheets issue: 13.06.2022:
About "Prehistoric Animals Stamp Series" - Set I:
On 13.06.2023, in the new "Prehistoric Animals Stamp Series", Post NL (Netherlands Post) has issued the first three stamp sheets featuring the Fox Whale, the Woolly Mammoth and the Sabre-toothed Cat.
Each stamp sheet consisted of five stamps featuring the animals and their fossils.
The Prehistoric Animals Stamp Series comprises 12 stamp sheets in all.
Every quarter, PostNL will issue three stamp sheets at a time.
The next issue dates are 26.09.2023 (Nothosaurus, Woolly Rhinoceros and Aurochs), 14.11.2023 (Blunt-snouted Dolphin, Mastodon and Great Auk) and 19.03.2024 (Large Baleen Whale, Giant Beaver and Steppe Bison).
The denomination on these stamps is ‘1’, the denomination for items weighing up to 20g with destinations in the Netherlands. The design of the stamps was created by studio026 in Velp.
The prehistoric Stamp Series - will represent animals from various geological epochs:
The Prehistoric Animals stamps will depict animals from various geological epochs, such as the Nothosaurus from the Triassic (245 million years ago), the Large Baleen Whale from the Miocene (8.7-8.1 million years ago), the Blunt-snouted Dolphin from the Pliocene (3 million years ago), the Woolly Mammoth from the Pleistocene (2 million years ago) and the Great Auk from the Holocene (approximately 5,000 years ago).
All 12 prehistoric animals featured on the stamps inhabited the area that is now The Netherlands.
Their presence has been inferred from fossils found in Dutch soil, including in the North Sea, in the Eastern and Western Scheldt, along rivers and in quarries. The fossils predominantly comprise bones, skulls, jaws, teeth, molars and horns. Based on the shape of the fossils, paleontologists can deduce how large the animals were and their other external features.
Comparison with surviving related species also provides useful information.
Each stamp sheet in the Prehistoric Animals Stamp Series includes five personal stamps in five different designs.
Three stamps feature various images of the prehistoric animal in its natural habitat.
The other two stamps feature fossils of the same animal, surrounded by drawn earth layers in which that fossil was found.
The sheet edge features one of the animal photos in large. This photo runs underneath the stamps.
Each stamp sheet has a base colour referring to the geological epoch in which the prehistoric animal existed.
The timeline of all these epochs is shown vertically on the left-hand side of the stamp sheet, above the series title. The name of the prehistoric animal appears on each stamp and in the top right-hand corner of the sheet.
The bottom right-hand corner features a short text about the species and its fossils.
The font used for the denomination 1 and Nederland was designed in 2018 by type designer Martin Majoor from Arnhem.
The Square 721 (a version of Eurostile by Turin-based type designer Aldo Novarese, 1962, published by Bitstream) was used for the title and the Akzidenz Grotesk (H. Berthold AG from Berlin, 1896) was used for the body text.
Fraunces (Phaedra Charles for Undercase Type from New York, 2020) was used as the serif font.
All of the animals featured on the Prehistoric animals stamps have become extinct – some of them millions of years ago. However, science can still deduce from the fossils what the animals roughly looked like.
After Velp-based studio026 was commissioned to design 12 stamp sheets about prehistoric animals exhibited at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam.
Life-like models and drawings were combined with fossils from the Natural History Museum Rotterdam. From those combinations, 12 prehistoric animals were selected, all of which lived on Dutch soil at one stage.
The Stamp Sheets:
The Sabre-toothed Cat, also called "Sabre-toothed tiger" or "Sabre-toothed Lion", was an extinct catlike carnivore belonging to either the extinct family Nimravidae or the subfamily Machairodontinae of the cat family (Felidae).
Named for the pair of elongated bladelike canine teeth in their upper jaw, they are often called sabre-toothed tigers or sabre-toothed lions, although the modern lion and tiger are true cats of the subfamily Felinae.
Sabre-toothed cats existed from the Eocene through the Pleistocene Epoch (56 million to 11,700 years ago). According to the fossil record, the Nimravidae were extant from about 37 million to 7 million years ago. Only distantly related to felids, they include the genera Hoplophoneus, Nimravus, Dinictis, and Barbourofelis.
The Machairodontinae, extant from about 12 million to less than 10,000 years ago, include the more familiar Smilodon as well as Homotherium and Meganteron.
Sabre-toothed cats roamed North America and Europe throughout the Miocene and Pliocene epochs (23 million to 2.6 million years ago). By Pliocene times, they had spread to Asia and Africa. During the Pleistocene, sabre-toothed cats were also present in South America.
The most widely known genus of sabre-toothed cats is Smilodon, the “sabre-toothed tiger.” A large, short-limbed cat that lived in North and South America during the Pleistocene Epoch, it was about the size of the modern African lion (Panthera leo) and represents the peak of sabre-tooth evolution.
The extinction pattern of the last of the sabre-toothed cats closely followed that of the mastodons. As those elephant-like animals became extinct in the Old World during the late Pliocene, sabre-toothed cats died out also. In North and South America, however, where mastodons persisted throughout the Pleistocene, sabre-toothed cats continued successfully to the end of the epoch.
Fox Whale:
The Westerschelde estuary near the border of the Netherlands and Belgium is known for its fossil contents since the 17th century. Fossil bones are located at great depth in this busy shipping lane and are therefore very hard to collect and study.
In 2014-2018, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, working closely with local fishermen, recovered an amazing treasure of 5,000 vertebrate fossils of whales and terrestrial mammals.
The major scientific discovery of the expedition was the recognition of a small area in the Westerschelde that yielded large and heavy blocks of sandstone with unique and exquisitely preserved marine mammal fauna.
The sandstone blocks contain whale skulls and vertebrae which are still more or less in correct anatomical order. Almost all of the recovered whale and dolphin species were hitherto unknown to scientists.
Study of fossil single-celled organisms from the sediment has shown that the fossils are about 7.5 to 8.8 million years old.
Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius):
About the Natural History Museum, Rotterdam:
The Natural History Museum Rotterdam has its origins in collecting animals, shells, fossils and other naturalia from the collection of Dr A. B. van Deinse.
The museum was founded in 1927.
Since 1987, it has been based in Villa Dijkzigt on Westzeedijk in Museumpark (an urban park in Rotterdam).
The Natural History Museum Rotterdam has a special place in the Rotterdam cultural sector and plays a pioneering role among Dutch Natural History museums across the region. The museum attracts over 40,000 visitors each year.
Technical details:
Issue Date: 13.06.2023
Designer: studio026, Velp
Process: Offset
Colours: Cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK)
Size:
Stamp size: 30.00 mm x 40.00 mm (w x h),
Sheet size: 170.00 mm x 122.00 mm (w x h)
Values: Denomination "1" for post weighing up to 20g with destinations within the Netherlands.
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Santosh Khanna has commented:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for sharing this interesting and informative post."
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