Natural History Museum Vienna

The Naturhistorisches Museum opened in 1889 in one of the twin palaces on Maria-Theresien-Platz, built to hold collections that go back to Franz Stephan of Lorraine's cabinet bought in 1750, and it holds around thirty million objects across thirty-nine halls. Much of the display furniture is original, so you are looking at nineteenth-century museum practice as well as at the specimens - dense cases, hand-lettered labels, and rooms arranged by systematic order rather than by narrative. The single most important object is the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figure about eleven centimetres high carved some twenty-nine thousand years ago and found in Lower Austria in 1908. There are meteorites in the largest such display anywhere, a Stellar's sea cow skeleton, dinosaur halls and a digital planetarium.

History

The collections go back to 1750, when Emperor Francis I, husband of Maria Theresa, bought what was then the world's largest natural history collection, some 30,000 objects, from the Florentine scholar Jean de Baillou; Francis also founded the Schönbrunn zoo in 1752 and the botanical garden in 1753, and in 1755 sent Nicolaus Joseph Jacquin to the Caribbean, Venezuela and Colombia, who brought back live animals and plants and 67 cases of specimens. After his death Maria Theresa gave the collection to the state and opened it to the public, and later expeditions added to it, among them the voyage to Brazil from 1817 that accompanied Archduchess Leopoldine to her marriage and the world voyage of the frigate Novara in 1857-1859 (Wikipedia, Natural History Museum, Vienna).

What you'll find

• The Venus of Willendorf - the 29,000-year-old limestone figure in its own room.
• Original 1889 display cases - nineteenth-century museum practice still in use.
• The meteorite collection - the largest on public display anywhere.
• Thirty-nine halls - systematic collections across the whole building.

When to go

All year; the roof tour runs in season. Half a day.

Things to know

It is enormous and the old-style dense cases tire people quickly - pick halls rather than trying all of them. Taxidermy is everywhere. Some galleries are dated by design and by intent.

Nearby

The Kunsthistorisches Museum is the twin building opposite; the Hofburg is next door.

Key facts