Geoscientific Museum of the University of Göttingen

Entrance area of ​​the museum

View into the exhibition rooms

Part of the Geopark with bed load detectors

The Geoscientific Museum of the University of Göttingen has been part of the "Faculty of Geosciences and Geography" of the University of Göttingen since 1974, together with the Geographical, Mineralogical and Geological Institutes .

history

The museum was founded together with other departments in 1773 as the “Royal Academic Museum” of the University of Göttingen. The geoscientific collections are, however, even older and come from the university natural history cabinet , which was created around the time the university was founded in 1737.

Over time, the holdings were increased by including important collections and donations from, among others, Christoph Andreas Schlüter (1673–1744), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Georg Andreas Stelzner (1725–1802), Samuel Christian Hollmann (1696– 1787), Georg Thomas von Asch (1729–1807), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen (1809–1876).

Between 1877 and 1929 the geoscientific collections were exhibited in the Natural History Museum together with those of zoology and ethnology. For reasons of space, these were then housed separately again.

Collections and exhibitions

In the publicly accessible exhibition areas (more than 2,000 m ^{2 in} total ) there are selected exhibits from the thematic areas of geology , mineralogy and paleontology . In total, the collections comprise over 4.5 million objects and series in more than 20 sub-collections. Of these, around 3.4 million objects are in the fields of paleontology, 330,000 in mineralogy, 120,000 in geology (including meteorites) and 20,000 in the amber collection. The holdings of the Göttingen Geoscientific Museum thus represent the fourth largest geoscientific collection in Germany. Special exhibitions are held regularly, including “The Schwarzorter Funde der Königsberger Amber Collection” (2014) and “Zwo7fuenF” (2013) for the museum's 275th anniversary the permanent exhibitions are successively revised, renewed and expanded.

The museum also has a park-like facility that is used as a so-called "Geopark" and exhibits large geological objects and artistic models. Furthermore, there are plants from the geological past.

literature

• Joachim Reitner, Otto Heinrich Walliser, Gudrun Hammer-Schiemann, Hans Jahnke and Günther Schnorrer: Museum and collection of the Center for Geosciences at the Faculty of Geosciences. In: “Completely designed for studying.” The museums, collections and gardens of the University of Göttingen. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3892444528 , pp. 206-216.

Web links

Commons : Geoscientific Museum of the University of Göttingen  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Homepage of the museum
• University collections in Germany - Geoscientific Museum of the University of Göttingen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mike Reich: On the early history of the Göttingen university collections . In: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Ed.): Things of knowledge. The collections, museums and gardens of the University of Göttingen . 1st edition. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1064-3 , p. 79-88 .
2. ↑ Mike Reich: Introduction . In: Georg-August University of Göttingen (ed.): The collections, museums and gardens of the University of Göttingen . 1st edition. Universitätsverlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-86395-140-5 , p. 5 .
3. ↑ Mike Reich, Alexander Gehler, Tanja R. Stegemann: A chronicle of the Göttingen geoscientific institutes and collections . Geoscientific Museum, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-943647-05-1 , p. 1-32 .
4. ^ Mike Reich, Joachim Reitner, Vanessa J. Roden, Tanja R. Stegemann: The Geoscience Collections of the Göttingen University . 2nd Edition. Geoscientific Museum, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-943647-04-4 , p. 1-24 .
5. ^ Geoscientific Museum - exhibition with mammoth skin and Martian rock in the Göttinger Tageblatt