On January 29th, we had our first excursion to the world famous Natural History Museum, the NHM. About 40 scholarship holders from 20 different countries were warmly welcomed by the director Christian Köberl. Christian Köberl, being a scientist himself, has been supervising several OeAD scholarship holders in the past. The Natural History Museum is involved in many different research activities from anthropology, botany and zoology to geology and paleontology. Today the museum houses approximately 30 million specimens, only a very small percentage is showcased in the 39 exhibit halls.
After these introductory remarks, we divided into two groups and started our tour through the museum. Some artifacts date back to the time of Emperor Franz I Stephan of Lorraine, Maria Theresa’s husband, who purchased the first pieces around 1750. During our tour we saw the amazing variety of minerals, gemstones and meteorites, we were impressed by the enormous dinosaur skeletons and of course we admired the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette that is only 11 centimeter small, but more than 29.000 years old.
We ended our tour with a walk on the roof, from where we had a spectacular view on the imperial buildings along the Ring, the Parliament and the Kahlenberg in the background. Fortunately there was still enough time to explore the Museum on our own after the tour. Many of us visited the special exhibition about the history of war (war. tracing an evolution) and tried out the different interactive offers (eg. portrait photo of visitors is transformed into an Homo neanderthalensis or other human ancestors) It is really worth to visit the Natural History Museum Vienna more than once!
