Research history

The aim to understand the origin and evolution of life on earth has been a major motivation during the century long history of the Museum für Naturkunde, which was founded 1810 as part of the then new Berlin University. Many renowned Berlin scholars and scientists helped to raise the museum to prominence and worldwide recognition. These include the geologist and palaeontologist Leopold von Buch (1774-1853), a contemporary and friend of Alexander von Humboldt, as well as the zoologist Wilhelm Peters and the anatomists Karl Asmund Rudolphi and

Johannes Müller, but also Karl August Möbius, who was director of the museum from 1887 to 1905, and later especially the ornithologist and systematist Erwin Stresemann (1889-1972). He was mentor and active promoter of the probably best-known evolutionary biologist and systematist of the 20th century, who started out working at the Berlin Museum of Natural History: Ernst Mayr (1904-2005).