The History of the collections

The Museum für Naturkunde can look back on a long and eventful history. Its huge collections are, at least in part, considerably older than the museum building itself. The present museum originated from three institutions, established in 1810 as part of the founding of the Berlin University on Unter den Linden. These were the anatomical-zootomical, the mineralogical (from 1814) and the zoological museums. The core of the zoological collections comprised specimens from Count Johann Centurius von Hoffmannsegg and the Siberia-explorer Peter Simon Pallas.

The mineralogical museum derived from the royal mineral-cabinet and included, as well as minerals, fossils from Baron von Schlotheim, Leopold von Buch und Alexander von Humboldt among its treasures.

On December 2nd,1889 the three separate museums were brought together under the name ‘Museum für Naturkunde’ in the new building on Invalidenstraße. Expeditions, gifts and purchases greatly enlarged the collections. Among the most important research trips between 1875 and 1910 were the “Gazelle”-expedition, the Valdivia deep-sea expedition and the Tendaguru expedition; the latter bringing 250 tons of fossilized dinosaur bones back to Berlin. The collections continued to grow in the following years. They remain to this day the raw material for interdisciplinary research within the museum and are an invaluable archive of the history of life on earth.