|
The Humboldt Museum is officially called the Museum fur Naturkunde and
is the first national museum in the world that has more twenty five million
specimens and more than ten thousand type specimens. The top two draws of the
museum include the world's largest mounted dinosaur and the earliest known bird
in the world called Archaeopteryx. It has been divided into several institutes
dealing with stuff like Paleontology, Mineralogy, and Zoology and is without
doubt the largest museum of natural history in Germany.
The museum has also been inculcated into the Humboldt University of Berlin
which was established way back in 1810. The specimens and the artifacts that
have been kept in the museum go even further back with some going back to the
days of the Prussian Academy in the eighteenth century. The museum has one of
the most extensive specimen collections in the world attracting researchers
from far and wide. These specimens have been collected from places as far as
Tendaguru, Africa.
There is a separate collection of minerals which claims to represent at least
three fourth of the minerals that is there on the planet earth. Some animal
exhibits are also present in the museum including the largest piece of Amber
in the world, extinct guagga and Tasmanian tiger. The chief guest of the whole
place is Bobby the Gorilla who was a celebrity in the Berlin Zoo from the 1920s
to the 1930s. The giant skeleton of the dinosaur is one of the top attractions
of the place and when it was living it could have easily weighed some fifty
tones or so.
Another interesting exhibit is the skeletal remains of Archaeopteryx lithographica
which has a body like a dinosaur and is flanked by wings and a long lizard like
tail. The origin of species by Charles Darwin catapulted it to the top of the
popularity charts making it a house hold name.
|
