Berlin – Museum für Naturkunde 02
Image by Daniel Mennerich
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.
The short denomination form Humboldt-Museum is misleading for two reasons: First, because since 2009 the Naturkundemuseum does not belong any more to Humboldt University; second, there is another Humboldt-Museum in Berlin in Tegel Palace dealing with brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
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 historical mount (until about 2005) was 12.72 m (41 ft 5 in) tall, and 22.25 m (73 ft) long. In 2007 it was remounted according to new scientific evidence, reaching a height of 13.27 m. 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.
