Established | 1810 |
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Location | Invalidenstraße 43 10115 Berlin, Germany |
Coordinates | 52°31′48″N 13°22′46″E / 52.530020°N 13.379514°E |
Type | Natural history museum |
Director | Johannes Vogel |
Website | http://www.naturkundemuseum.berlin/en |
The Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), occasionally called the Naturkundemuseum or Humboldt-Museum for short, (officially: Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung), is a natural history museum in Berlin, Germany. The museum houses more than 30 million zoological, paleontological, and mineralogical specimens, including more than ten thousand type specimens. It is famous for two exhibits: the largest mounted dinosaur in the world, and an well-preserved specimen of the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx.
Established in 1810, it is the largest museum of natural history in Germany. The museum's mineral collections date back to the Prussian Academy of Sciences of 1700. Important historic zoological specimens include those recovered by the German deep-sea Valdiva expedition (1898–99), the German Southpolar Expedition (1901–03), and the German Sunda Expedition (1929–31). Expeditions to fossil beds in Tendaguru in former Deutsch Ostafrika (today Tanzania) unearthed rich paleontological treasures. The collections are so extensive that less than 1 in 5000 specimens is exhibited, and they attract researchers from around the world.
Additional exhibits include a mineral collection representing 75% of the minerals in the world, a large meteor collection, the largest piece of amber in the world; exhibits of the now-extinct quagga, huia, and tasmanian tiger, and "Bobby" the gorilla, a Berlin Zoo celebrity from the 1920s and 1930s.