Friday, July 10, 2009

Museum of Natural History (10.01.09)



It’s situated opposite the Museum of Art History. Both buildings were grounded in the Habsburg’s days, of course and both of them look amazing. You just don’t know what to admire – the abundance of exhibits or the splandourously decorated rooms.
We were visiting Naturhistorisches Museum (the original name) for about 3 hours, but it still wasn’t enough because the museum counts 39 large rooms, full of showcases. It’s just impossible to stay there longer, so not all the tiny stones, plants and animals were given the same amount of time. There are also rooms of minerals, meteorites, reconstruction of famous caves, prehistoric art, fossils, micro world under the microscopes, stuffed animals (which made me shiver) e.g. birds, fish, dinosaurs’ skeletons, tomb of prehistoric people… It’s about 20 million items…




But even without them the building is extremely attractive – the main hall boasts a huge painting on the ceiling, another paintings are on the walls, there’s also a lot of sculptures of famous people (e.g. Newton, Humboldt). The rooms are also magnificent – with abundance of sculptures, paintings, various decorations.
The most interesting seemed to me the model of earth seen from a satellite. It was revolving around presenting various views – the globe by night, in the day time, with ozone layer, snow cover, sea currents. Another fascinating item was a ‘time machine’ – with a turn of a wheel you could see the shape of the continents in the past and in the future. Oh, and the underwater rooms were quite attractive, as well. I also spent a lot of time in a room with microscopes, watching various tiny creatures, but don’t ask me about their names – neither German nor Latin captions were helpful here.



The museum possesses a separate room devoted to Venus of prehistoric people. There was e.g. Venus from Willendorf, which is already 25 000 years old and the reconstructions of excavations of various Venuses, presenting e.g. a position in which they were found.

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