Photo: Francisco Welter-Schultes · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Zoologisches Museum Göttingen

University of Göttingen zoological collection with over 120,000 specimens; closed since 2017 and due to reopen as a biodiversity museum.

Temporarily closed

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Temporarily closed. The exhibition has been closed since the building's conversion began in 2017. The collection is due to reopen as the Biodiversitätsmuseum Göttingen on the upper floor of the Forum Wissen; Wikipedia gives 2027/28, while the museum's website gives no date.

About the museum

The zoological collection dates back to the "Königlich Academische Museum" (Royal Academic Museum), founded in 1773 and shaped by the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Over three centuries it grew to well over 100,000 specimens, including scientifically important type specimens and specimens of species that are now extinct.

From the late 1870s, zoology was housed in the newly built Naturhistorisches Museum on Berliner Straße. While the other disciplines had left the building by the end of the 1930s, the Zoologisches Museum remained there until 2017; its best-known exhibit was the skeleton of a sperm whale, around 17 meters long.

The exhibition closed when the building was converted into the Forum Wissen. The sperm whale skeleton was remounted in 2023 and has since hung above the Forum Wissen café. On the building's upper floor, the Biodiversitätsmuseum Göttingen (Göttingen Biodiversity Museum) is being created; it is to present parts of the zoological collections in a new way and explore how biodiversity arises, how it interacts, and how it is being changed by humans. An interactive exhibition is planned that will bring researchers and their projects together with the public.