NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

It is the counterpart of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, just across the street, on the masterly Theresienplatz. This museum is to the natural sciences what its neighbor is to art. The great imperial collection of natural history is presented through a maze of rooms devoted to lizards, precious stones, including the largest topaz in the world (117 kg), dinosaur skeletons... A collection resulting from expeditions financed by the emperor, many of them carried out in the 19th century, but also from the private collection of the KuK crown, largely supplied by Emperor Francis I of Lorraine, the husband of Maria Theresa. In 1750, he had acquired the rich collection of the Florentine scientist Jean de Baillou. A passion was born! It is said that the emperor visited his collection of 30,000 fossils and minerals every day. It was he who financed the first Austrian scientific expedition overseas. Upon her untimely death, Maria Theresa donated her collection to the state. The building that houses it today was commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I to the architects Hasenauer and Semper. Inaugurated in 1889, its facade is a replica of the one opposite, which houses the Museum of Fine Arts. These two flamboyant buildings form one of Vienna's most emblematic architectural ensembles.

In addition to the lizards' rooms, which always have an effect, especially on the youngest visitors, one cannot fail to be impressed by the discovery of the largest topaz in the world and one understands there all the importance of the size of a precious stone in the revelation of its brilliance. There is also a collection of prehistoric objects from archaeological excavations, the highlight of which is the Venus of Willendorf (Lower Austria), which attests to the presence of human life in the Austrian countryside more than 29,500 years ago. A beautiful gallery of dinosaur skeletons but also of extinct naturalized animals, from reptiles to mammals, including the Steller's rhytine, a marine mammal of the dugong and manatee family, which disappeared more than 200 years ago. In 2014, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of its Natural History Museum, Vienna got a magnificent planetarium to send us to the stars as well. A high-tech projector in the dome allows visitors to board the Milky Way or the rings of Saturn.