The scientific collections

The Museum für Naturkunde houses over 30 million collection items.

The zoological collection comprise
• over 10 million invertebrates (not including insects)
• over 15 million insects, including 6 million beetles and 4 million butterflies and moths
• approximately 580,000 vertebrates

The Museum has an animal sound archive containing approximately 120,000 animal sound recordings.

The palaeontological collections comprise:
• 1.2 million fossil vertebrates
• 1.1 million fossil invertebrates
• 320,000 palaeobotanical collection pieces

The mineralogical- petrological collections contain 312,000 samples, of which:
• 250,000 mineral specimens
• 57,000 petrographic-geographic samples
• 4.900 meteorite fragments of 2,300 different meteorites (most comprehensive collection in Germany)