Humboldt Museum, Berlin

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.