Museum für Naturkunde combines natural history collections with active scientific research. Its historic galleries include internationally known fossils, while the institution’s wider holdings preserve millions of specimens used to study biodiversity and the history of life.
Guide preview
The dinosaur skeletons make an immediate impression, but Museum für Naturkunde is also a working research institution. Its collections contain more than 30 million objects, gathered for study as well as display. The present museum building opened in 1889, and its galleries connect that nineteenth-century public museum tradition with current scientific questions.
Continue exploring
Discover the full story
Keep reading with a travel pass and explore every full guide and tour.
UpgradeQuick facts
- The current museum building opened in 1889.
- The collections contain more than 30 million objects.
- The museum’s dinosaur displays include the Tendaguru fossils collected in what is now Tanzania.
More places in Berlin
Alexanderplatz
Alexanderplatz has repeatedly changed from parade ground and market to transport hub, socialist showcase, and contemporary meeting place. Its World Time Clock and surrounding buildings preserve a visible layer of East Berlin’s postwar redesign.
Alte Nationalgalerie
Alte Nationalgalerie resembles a temple raised above the Spree, a form that expresses the nineteenth-century ambition to make art and science public. Its collection began with a donor’s gift and grew into a major home for Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist painting.
Altes Museum
Altes Museum’s colonnade and central rotunda were designed to make a royal collection accessible to the public. Opened in 1830, it was Berlin’s first public museum, turning the act of viewing antiquities into a civic experience rather than a privilege reserved for court and nobility.
Bauhaus Archive
The Bauhaus Archive’s distinctive roofline makes the museum building itself part of the collection’s story. Designed by Walter Gropius and adapted for Berlin, it gives a later home to a school whose ideas traveled far beyond its brief existence from 1919 to 1933.
Bebelplatz
A glass panel set into Bebelplatz reveals empty shelves beneath the square, a quiet memorial to the Nazi book burning of 10 May 1933. The underground library gives absence a physical form, asking visitors to remember the writers and ideas targeted by the regime.
Berlin Botanical Garden
Berlin Botanical Garden began as a medicinal and agricultural teaching garden before moving to Dahlem for more room. Its extensive living collections make classification visible in the landscape, while its history also prompts questions about how botanical knowledge was gathered and organized.