Museum Evolution
You've never seen anything like this before!
The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin is changing. The Museum Evolution has begun.
Do we know each other?
You may have visited the Museum für Naturkunde many times before. You’re familiar with Archaeopteryx and Bobby the gorilla. In our Wet Collection, you’ve spotted guppies, deep-sea anglerfish and hammerhead sharks.
But did you know that during your visit you can only see a small part of our collection? Out of more than 30 million objects, we display only around 10,000 in the Dinosaur Hall, the Mineral Hall and other exhibitions.
We’re changing that. Because we’re changing!
We are renovating, making our collection accessible and creating new spaces for research, exchange and collaborative learning. We call this Museum Evolution.
Join us on our journey into the future of the museum!
CONSTRUCTION
Our museum building has stood since 1889. Shortly after we moved from the main building of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the new building became too small for the growing collection.
Shortly before the end of the Second World War, a bomb destroyed the east wing. Research, collection and exhibition work then continued on a makeshift basis amongst the ruins for decades.
The reconstruction of the east wing in 2010 marked the start of our Museum Evolution. Today, the Wet Collection – open to the public and comprising 276,000 specimens – is part of the tour, including the Chinese swordfish, which became extinct only a few years ago. An archive of life unlike anything anyone has ever seen before!
From now on, we will gradually open further parts of our collection and modernise the historic building – in keeping with its heritage, energy-efficient, sustainable and accessible.
COLLECTION
We are renovating and expanding the museum building to give you new insights into our collection. To this end, large parts of the collection are being relocated – some to our new satellite site in Berlin-Adlershof. We are handling every single object, conserving it and digitally cataloguing it – a major scientific and logistical project. And yes: in the process, we’re also uncovering objects that almost nobody has ever seen before!
The special exhibition ZUGvögel – A Collection in Motion already offers a glimpse of what this Museum Evolution looks like. For this, more than 10,000 historical bird specimens have been moved from the Historic Bird Hall to the exhibition. We have cleaned, stabilised and photographed them so that in future they can be viewed not only in the museum but also digitally.
Our insect collection is also changing. In the Entomology section, we preserve around 15 million specimens. In the special exhibition digitize!, we are photographing and digitally cataloguing them step by step. Specimens of particular scientific value are being digitised in very high resolution or even as 3D models. You’ve never seen our treasures like this before!
Developing the collection makes research more visible and opens up new avenues of access – in the museum and soon also online via our new data portal.
digitized!
KNOWLEDGE
I’ve never looked at it that way before!
Knowledge isn’t just found in specialist publications or behind museum doors. Science thrives on the exchange of different perspectives, experiences and questions. That’s why we’re opening up our collection – not as an end in itself, but to help us live together better on our planet.
The special exhibition ZUGvögel – A Collection in Motion shows what this can look like. More than 350 people contributed their own questions and ideas to its development.
The exhibition also shows that natural history collections tell us not only about nature, but also, for example, about colonial contexts. We explore these perspectives further in the new halls dedicated to mammalian skulls, as well as deer and antlered animals.
Natural history objects also challenge the influence of humans on nature. And it is not only natural history objects that tell this story! On the Changing Natures platform, you can therefore submit a personal object that tells of the changes in your own environment.
More on knowledge transfer, dialogue and collaborative learning
