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Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen
- Institution code
- NHMD
- Status of Institution
- Active
- Description
- The origins of the Zoological Museum—one of Europe's oldest—dates back to a collection created more than 350 years ago Professor Ole Worm (1588–1654). His Kunstkammer or 'Cabinet of Curiosities' contained many strange objects, including a horse jaw rewaxed by a tree root that's still in the Zoological Museum's collections today. Following Worm's death, his collection was merged into King Frederik III's' Royal Kunstkammer.
In 1862, the current Zoological Museum arose from a merger of the successor to the royal collection, The Royal Museum of Natural History and the Zoological Museum at the University of Copenhagen.
The combined institution was housed in an impressive, purpose-built museum in Krystalgade, which opened to the public on 2 November 1870. The Danish national zoological collections remained in that building for the next century. The growth of collections eventually exceeded the capacity of the building in Krystalgade, with large portions of them maintained off-site. In 1967, the old museum closed while work was underway on new exhibitions in a new building in Universitetsparken, which opened to audiences in 1970.
The Universitetsparken building contains very large scientific collections containing specimens from all over the world. Along with the older collections, there are millions of specimens collected during the course of three centuries on expeditions in Greenland and the West Indies, among other locations.
The Museum still collects animals, now mostly sea creatures and insects. For mammals and birds, small blood samples are most often taken for DNA analysis. The Museum's zoologists are concerned with tracing evolutionary relationships and exploring wildlife, in particularly interesting and endangered areas, such as the South American rainforest, the mountain forests of East Africa and Southeast Asia, the wildlife of the North Atlantic and Greenland.
- Homepage
- https://zoologi.snm.ku.dk/english/