There's an awesome new project called Zoosphere that is taking high-resolution images of biological specimens and putting them online.  This seems to be a project of the Berlin Natural History Museum, which is digitizing its insect collections, though I'm not entirely sure whether other museums are involved -- there are a number of logos at the bottom of the project website, but they may just be advisors/financial sponsors/etc.  The images at Zoosphere include photos of type specimens and are pretty awesome.  NYT coverage here.  It appears that the images posted so far are CC-0, which is great. 

I'm not sure exactly how Wikipedia/Commons could be involved in this besides scraping the content they upload and potentially encouraging them to continue using free licensing, but it might make sense to have a German Wikimedian contact them.  Does anyone have German contacts that could be useful here?