Insights into the Research Collection
Wet Collection
Archive of Life in Amber Tones
The exhibition tour of the wet collection offers insights into scientific work behind glass. Here, we show how we preserve, document, and maintain organisms for research and for future generations.
Thousands of jars shimmer in amber tones in the wet collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Preserved in ethanol, they hold rays, sharks, perch, snakes, and deep-sea fish. With more than 320,000 containers and around one million specimens, our wet collection is among the most important worldwide.
As an archive of life, the wet collection provides valuable data for researching the planet’s biodiversity. Many objects are more than 200 years old and are still used internationally as reference material for species descriptions, distribution analyses, and evolutionary research.
In the exhibition tour, you will mainly see fish and snakes. In the non-public areas, wet specimens from a wide range of animal groups – from invertebrates such as mussels and spiders to frogs and other vertebrates – are available for scientific research.
What is a wet collection?
In the museum’s wet collection, we preserve animals of all groups in a mixture of 70 percent ethanol and 30 percent water. This method protects the specimens from decomposition and makes them usable for DNA analyses and other studies over the long term.
Over time, the animals lose their original color – a ray that was once dark now appears pale. Each specimen is accompanied by a label with information on the place and year of collection as well as the species. Without this information, an object would have little scientific value – whether as a wet or dry specimen.
To safely preserve this unique research collection, we keep it constantly cooled below the flash point of around 18 degrees Celsius. Especially on summer days, it is probably the coolest place in the museum.
More than 320,000 jars, around one million specimens: the wet collection preserves a unique archive of biodiversity – with some objects over 200 years old
Photo: Verena Brüning
Deep-sea anglerfish Linophryne maderensis: the female carries a permanently fused dwarf male – an extreme adaptation to life in the lightless deep sea.
Photo: Verena Brüning
Each jar is a dataset: location, date, and species make the specimens indispensable sources for research on evolution, biodiversity, and climate change.
Photo: Verena Brüning
From Ruin to Open Research Collection
The wet collection is housed in the museum’s east wing, which was destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt and reopened in 2010 after decades of planning. The award-winning new building provides optimal conditions for conservation, fire protection, and documentation.
A new approach was crucial in the planning: for the first time, we made an actively used research collection permanently visible to visitors. This step marked an important starting point in our Museum Evolution – toward greater openness, transparency, and dialogue between science and society.
We will continue this principle consistently in the coming years. As part of further construction measures, we are gradually making new halls and parts of the collection accessible and integrating them into our museum program. These include historically planned exhibition halls such as the Historical Bird Hall, as well as newly created spaces in which collections, research, and public engagement come together visibly.
In this way, the museum is gradually developing into an open, integrated research museum of the 21st century.
The east wing, restored in line with heritage requirements, deliberately features a façade of grey exposed concrete that recalls the destruction of the Second World War and keeps the building’s history visible. 
Former ruin of the east wing of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Today, it houses, among other things, the wet collection and our preparation workshops. 
The historic photograph shows the severe damage to the roof of the east wing after a bombing hit during the Second World War. 
Historic photograph from the former Fish Hall: wet specimens from various animal groups were previously distributed across several parts of the building and housed under very different conservation conditions. 
Historic photograph of wet specimens from various animal groups in the Bridge Hall of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. As part of the Museum Evolution, the hall will be made accessible again and used as an open collection in the future. 
In the non-public areas of the wet collection, we preserve, among other things, amphibian specimens under optimal conservation conditions for research.
Photo: Carola Radke
