An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has published a commentary highlighting how digitization in a contextualized form can be used as a powerful research tool to better understand and make colonial natural history collections more accessible. Using the famous collection of fossils extracte in the colony of German, now Tanzania, as an example, they argue that natural history objects from colonial contexts must be made accessible online together with the associated archival records. Digitization as research is an innovative method to investigate and make visible the intercultural and interdisciplinary significance of colonial natural history objects.