Wissensmuseum Göttingen

Description

The Zoologische Museum der Universität Göttingen served as the public presentation of the scientific holdings of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. It belonged to the Johann-Friedrich-Blumenbach Institut für Zoologie und Anthropologie and displayed the portion of an extensive research collection that was accessible to visitors.

The museum was housed in the former Zoologisches Institut at Berliner Straße 28, not far from Göttingen station. Its origins go back to 1773, when the house was founded as the Königliches Academisches Museum; the zoological collections moved in 1878 into the newly erected building on Berliner Straße. Through expeditions and scientific networks, the holdings grew continuously.

The collection comprised more than 100,000 prepared specimens in jars, boxes and cases and was therefore relatively small in terms of size (for example compared with the Überseemuseum Bremen with around 1 million specimens or the Zoologisches Museum Hamburg with about 10 million). The items included type material (holotypes) as well as rare and partly extinct species from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of the world.

The exhibitions addressed the native fauna, evolutionary relationships and the systematics of animals, as well as skeletal anatomy and the skeletons of vertebrates. Significant objects included the skeleton of an approximately 18-year-old male sperm whale, about 17 metres long, which dominated a considerable part of the exhibition space and was reassembled in 2023 to be hung in the café of the Universitätsmuseum Forum Wissen housed in the building. Also on display were an alcohol-preserved specimen and an X-ray image of a so-called rat king.

Since the start of an extensive building renovation project in 2018, the Zoologische Museum has been closed; a reopening under the name Biodiversitätsmuseum Göttingen is planned for late 2026. In early June 2022 the Universitätsmuseum Forum Wissen opened in the building.