page_title: Natural History Museum, Berlin
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Natural History Museum, Berlin / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Bao Bao at the Natural History Museum Berlin
context_page_description: The Natural History Museum is a natural history museum located in Berlin, Germany. It exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history and in such domain it is one of three major museums in Germany alongside Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt and Museum Koenig in Bonn.
  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 a well-preserved specimen of the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx. 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, the German Southpolar Expedition, and the German Sunda Expedition. Expeditions to fossil beds in Tendaguru in former Deutsch Ostafrika 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.
context_section_description: Minerals in the museum were originally part of the collection of instructors from the Berlin Mining Academy. The University of Berlin was founded in 1810, and acquired the first of these collections in 1814, under the aegis of the new Museum of Mineralogy. In 1857, the paleontology department was founded, and 1854 a department of petrography and general geology was added.
  By 1886 the university was overflowing with collections, so design began on a new building nearby at Invalidenstraße 43, which opened as the Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum) in 1889. The museum was built on the site of a former ironworks and this is reflected in two spectacular cast iron stairwells within the building.
  Of particular significance is the contribution of the first director after the move to the new building. In the past the museum simply consisted of the entire collections being open to the public, but Karl Möbius instigated a clear split between a public exhibition space with a few choice specimens, together with explanations of their relevance, and the remainder of the collection held in archives for scientific study.
  The collections were damaged by the Allied bombing of Berlin during World War II. The eastern wing was severely damaged, and was rebuilt only in 2011, now housing the alcohol collections (partly publicly accessible).
  In 1993, after the shake-up caused by the reunification of Germany, the museum split into the three divisions: The Institutes of Mineralogy, Zoology, and Paleontology. Infighting between the institute directors led to important changes in 2006, which saw the appointment of a Director General and the replacement of the former institutes by a division into Collections, Research and Exhibitions. Since January 1, 2009 the Museum has officially separated from the Humboldt-University and became part of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community as the Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Evolutionary and Biodiversity Research at the Humboldt University, Berlin (German: Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). It is legally set up as a foundation.
caption: Bao Bao the Giant Panda that lived at the Berlin Zoo
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