MUSEUM FUR NATURKUNDE

The Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), occasionally called the Naturkundemuseum or Humboldt Museum for short, (officially: Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), 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 spectacular exhibits: the largest mounted dinosaur in the world, and an exquisitely 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 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 and tasmanian tiger, and "Bobby" the gorilla, a Berlin Zoo celebrity from the 1920s and 1930s.


Dinosaur Hall

The specimen of Giraffatitan brancai in the central exhibit hall is the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world.It is composed of fossilized bones recovered by the German paleontologist Werner Janensch from the fossil-rich Tendaguru beds of Tanzania between 1909 and 1913. The remains are primarily from one gigantic animal, except for a few tail bones (caudal vertebrae) which belong to another animal of the same size and species.
The mount is 12.72 m (41 ft 5 in) tall, and 22.25 m (73 ft) long (as of 2005). When living, the long-tailed, long-necked herbivore probably weighed 50 t (55 tons). While the Diplodocus carnegiei mounted next to it (a copy of an original from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, United States) actually exceeds it in length (27 m, or 90 ft), the Berlin specimen is taller, and far more massive.
The "Berlin Specimen" of Archaeopteryx lithographica (HMN 1880), is displayed in the central exhibit hall. The dinosaur-like body with an attached tooth-filled head, wings, claws, long lizard-like tail, and the clear impression of feathers in the surrounding stone is strong evidence of the link between reptiles and birds. The Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil; and the time of its discovery was apt: coming on the heels of Darwin's 1859 magnum opus, The Origin of Species, made it quite possibly the most famous fossil in the world.
Recovered from the German Solnhofen limestone beds in 1871, it is only the third Archaeopteryx to be discovered and the most complete. The first specimen, a single 150 million year old feather found in 1860, is also in the possession of the museum.

Minerals Halls

The MFN's collection comprises roughly 250,000 specimens of minerals, of which roughly 4,500 are on exhibit in the Hall of Minerals.

Evolution in action

A large hall explains the principles of evolution. It was opened in 2007 after a major renovation of parts of the building.