Museum of Natural History, Berlin

The Museum of Natural History, a unit of the Humboldt University in Berlin, is housed in a large, old building built to store and display the museum’s collections. A portion of the building was destroyed during World War II, and the temporary wood trusses and roof, built by Russian troops following the war, are still visible on the top floor, where they protect a collection of 6 million beetles.

The museum recently re-furbished its exhibition on dinosaurs, and the entrance queue was 4-6 people wide and at least 100 meters long. The wait time was 60-90 minutes, and I was thankful for the ICOM card that the Deutsches Museum had given me, which allowed immediate entrance for museum professionals.

The museum houses a large collection that includes a mixture of traditional mounted animal specimens collected from all over the world, dioramas, and a series of new exhibition galleries. Of particular interest was a large new gallery called “Evolution in Action,” which contained a dense collection of well-displayed specimens showing principles of evolution. This exhibition was enhanced by very readable text panels in both German and English and had labels describing a number of key aspects of the theory of evolution.

Small video screens were embedded in key exhibit labels to provide layering of information: pressing a hypertext link on a graphic label would bring up short text or video explanations in a small monitor in the label.

One particularly interesting gallery was devoted to showing how the museum processes and preserves its specimens. Displays illustrated, for example, the steps in preserving a bird, a mammal, a fish, a fossil, and an insect.

Another gallery devoted to earth systems had a 4-m-diameter globe in the center with a pair of large flat-panel monitors that moved around the equator, playing short videos on topics like plate tectonics that were linked to the location of the monitor at that moment.

An astronomy gallery included a large, round padded couch-like pod where several dozen visitors could lie on their back and watch a video on a round screen overhead. The first half of the 7-minute video (no narration) showed the formation of the universe from the big bang through time, ending up zooming into roof of the museum in Berlin. The second half of the video switched from time to scale and whisked visitors back out of the museum through the powers of 10 to the edge of the universe. I watched hundreds of visitors view the video each time it ran through its cycle.

The dinosaur hall is 4 stories tall and houses what is reputed to be the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton. Several large monitors played animations in which the skeletons morphed into live dinosaurs in their natural habitats and back; these animations were very popular and excellent in showing visitors how the inanimate bones in front of them might relate to live animals in the Mesozoic. Several dozen video scopes at the corners of the gallery had lines 4-6 people deep.

A moving exhibition of large mounted photographs, called “Nature: Our Precious Network,” showed images of human impact on the landscape and was developed to raise public awareness of biodiversity in preparation for the 9th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (to be held in Germany in 2008).

This exhibition, which was located in a remote side gallery that was not heavily trafficked, included a text discussion of global warming and the potential impacts of human activities on climate change. This poster and its message, however, were pretty much lost amid of the captivating images displayed in the room. During about 15 minutes spent in this gallery, I saw less than half a dozen other visitors and none with children.

As we left the museum at 2 pm, the queue was still 50 meters long…

The next stop was a short section of the Berlin Wall that had been left intact at the edge of a cemetery in Berlin. At ~2.5 m tall, it’s hard to imagine the profound impact this flimsy structure had on the world between August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989. However, having been interrogated at machine-gun point in a concrete bunker after an East-German guard found several cassette tapes I had mistakenly left in a car-door pocket on the way through Checkpoint Charlie, this recent visit brought me right back to my experience of October 1987 and memories of the no-man’s-land on the East-German side, where attempts to cross were generally met with shots from ever-present guards.