In this Science Programme, scientific questions in the fields of biology, earth sciences and planetology are investigated interdisciplinarily, together with partners all over the world. This research is collection-based and the new scientific findings in turn help developing our extensive collection. Zoologists, palaeontologists and geoscientists discover and study the diversity of life on Earth, the mechanisms of population differentiation and speciation, the evolution of body plans and the diversity of organisms. Our work spans Earth’s entire history - from the formation of our solar system to the present, and even to the modelling of scenarios of the future. We also study processes underlying diversity dynamics, based on changes in ecological communities in space and time.