Natural History Museum

Museum of Natural History Rotterdam

The Natural History Museum Rotterdam (or Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam in Dutch) lets you enjoy everything that nature has to offer like skeletons, stuffed animals including a giraffe, antlers, butterflies, fossils and pigeon’s nests!

Sperm whale

The museum is housed in a monumental villa and is connected to a modern glass pavilion. In this pavilion, which is the largest display case in the Netherlands, you can see the eyecather of the museum: a fifteen metre long complete skeleton of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus). The sperm whale stranded together with two others on the North Sea beach just south of The Hague on 12 January 1995. On basis of dental structure an age of about 30 year could be established, meaning the male was an adolescent.

Asian elephant

Besides the skeleton of the sperm whale you can find the impressive skeleton of the Asian elephant Ramon in the Natural History Museum. Ramon lived in Rotterdam Zoo Blijdorp from 1970 till 1998 and created five descendants during this period. In 1998 the elephant died by a brain haemorrhage and the Natural History Museum put his skeleton together bony by bone.

Exhibitions

But there’s more to see in this musuem like many permanent and temporary exhibitions like ‘Nature of the World’ and ‘Picked up, dredged up, carved out’. You can see 230 million years old fossils that were found in the Netherlands as well as skeletons and skulls of millions of years old whales. The museum is a pleasure to visit and there’s something to see fo everyone!