Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano

Museum

The museum was founded in 1838 when the naturalist Giuseppe de Cristoforis donated his collections to the city. Its first director was the taxonomist Giorgio Jan.

The museum is housed in a 19th-century building in the Indro Montanelli Garden, near the historic city gate of Porta Venezia. It was built between 1888 and 1893 in Neo-Romanesque style with Gothic elements.

Collections

The museum is divided into five different permanent sections: Mineralogy (with a large collection of minerals from all over the world); Paleontology (with several fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric organisms); Natural History of Man (dedicated to the origins and evolution of humans with a particular attention to the relationship of the latter with the environment); Invertebrate Zoology (dedicated to mollusks, arthropods and entomology); and Vertebrate Zoology (dedicated to vertebrates, both exotic and European).

The museum exhibits the largest Italian collection of over 100 full-size dioramas. These allow visitors to observe many aspects of faraway ecosystems.

The mineralogy section showcases several minerals from all over the world, including the world's largest sulfur crystal (from the province of Pesaro-Urbino) and an 8,000-carat Brazilian topaz crystal. Also displayed are examples of londonite, quartz, phosgenite, fluorite, malachite and other minerals.

The palaeontology section explains the basics of paleozoology and palaeobotany. Displays include fossils of several plants and animals. Among the most valuable pieces are a Spinosaurus snout, the skeletons of two pygmy elephants (Palaeoloxodon falconeri) from Sicily and the only existing fossil of the coelurosaurian theropod Scipionix samniticus. The museum also houses several other casts of dinosaur skeletons such as Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Dromaeosaurus, Plateosaurus, and Stan (dinosaur), the fifth most complete Tyrannosaurus ever found.

The natural history of man section is dedicated to the origins of humans from early primates to Homo sapiens. Human evolution is described from the phylogenetic, morphological and ecological points of view with several archaeological objects and realistic plastic models. One of the most valuable pieces is the cast of an Australopithecus afarensis skeleton. …