Tourist attractions in Vienna : Naturhistorisches Museum
The Natural History Museum in Vienna is one of the largest, oldest, and most noteworthy natural history museums in the world. The current building was completed in 1889 at the same time as the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Today, Naturhistorisches Museum with about 30 million specimens and artifacts displayed across 39 halls, that cover an area of 8,700 square meters (94,000 sq ft), is visited by over half a million visitors each year.
The main building of the Museum is an elaborate palace that has accommodated these constantly growing collections, since opening to the public as the Imperial Natural History Museum. Its collections were founded in 1750 by Emperor Franz I Stephan of Lorraine, the husband of Maria Theresa. However, some of the collections had been moved from even older buildings, such as the Hofbibliothek which contained the Zoology Cabinet (German: Tierkabinett) collections.
The first floor displays the species variety of the animal world, from protozoa to insects to highly developed mammals. Objects over 200 years old are of interest, not only on their own account but also as historical records for the history of science and the art of taxidermy: numerous stuffed animals of species either extinct, or extremely endangered, have made the collections irreplaceable.
On the upper floor (Hochparterre) a number of famous and unique objects can be seen, such as : the 25,000-year-old figure of the “Venus of Willendorf” found in 1908 in a village in Lower Austria, an almost complete skeleton of Steller’s Sea Cow, which became extinct more than 200 years ago, huge dinosaur skeletons, a giant topaz crystal weighing 117 kg (258 lb) and the largest and oldest meteorite collection in the world.
In the research departments of the Natural History Museum Vienna about 60 scientists are performing basic research in various fields of geosciences, biosciences and human sciences. Their main fields of research cover a wide range of topics from the origins of our Solar system and the evolution of animals and plants to human evolution, as well as prehistoric traditions and customs. Consequently, the museum has become an acknowledged center of competence for scientific questions of fundamental importance and is one of the largest non-university research institutions in Austria.
Text Sources: nhm-wien.ac.at and wikipedia.org
