Zoological Museum Amsterdam
The Zoological Museum Amsterdam (ZMA) was a natural history museum near the Oosterpark in Amsterdam , Netherlands . It belonged to the University of Amsterdam and was one of the two largest natural history museums in the Netherlands with around 13 million objects. In addition to the tasks of a museum, such as preserving the collections and setting up exhibitions, the ZMA was mainly used scientifically and in the context of university education.
In 2011 the collections were merged with those of the Naturalis and the Dutch National Herbarium in a National Center for Biodiversity (NCB Naturalis), which was founded on January 26, 2010.
history
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The Zoölogisch Museum Amsterdam went back to the establishment of the Natura Artis Magistra society in 1838, which organized lectures and demonstrations on exotic animals for the wealthy bourgeoisie, as well as showing stuffed and live exotic animals. In the second half of the 19th century, an animal museum for the native species was also set up, mainly for the education of school children, and the facility was attached to the rapidly growing University of Amsterdam. Max Weber , the first professor of zoology in Amsterdam and later director of Artis , received the dead animals from there for his anatomical studies. The ZMA concentrated on purely scientific collections, with a focus on the naming and classification of living things ( taxonomy ). Weber expanded the collections with material from his trips to South Africa and the Arctic as well as the Siboga expedition to Indonesia.
Society ran into economic difficulties during the recession of the 1930s. In order to prevent the sale of rare, extinct animals (such as giant alk or quagga ) to American museums, the city of Amsterdam and the province of Noord-Holland jointly acquired the properties on August 28, 1939 and rented the animals and stables back for one guilder per year (This is what today's Artis Zoo is based on ). The other buildings with the collections and the library became the property of the University of Amsterdam and thus became state property. At the beginning of the 1980s, the direct funding of the ZMA switched from the Ministry to the Faculty of Biology. Since it is primarily an educational institution, the ZMA financed it largely in proportion to the number of students. The ZMA was very popular with students, the presentations by ZMA staff met with great interest and the number of published scientific articles was initially very high. Since the available financial resources continued to shrink over the years, the ZMA had fewer and fewer employees and in 2010 plans were implemented to merge the ZMA with the collections of the Naturalis and the National Herbarium .