Galleries

Naturalis' new museum is a combined experience of seeing and doing. All ages will experience the beauty and richness of nature in impressive galleries. In the new galleries you will learn everything about the earliest life on Earth, about The Netherlands in the Ice Age and about the immense forces of our planet. You will also discover the most surprising ways in which plants and animals seduce each other. You can also look a huge African elephant right in the eyes see for yourself how destructive vulcanoes can actually be. Ever wondererd about life in the Dinosaur Era? You no longer have to.

The familiar Dutch landscape has been rendered unrecognizable and replaced by wild nature against a desolate prehistoric backdrop. Welcome to the Ice Age gallery. Here, you'll find a scale model that fills almost the entire gallery, surrounded by hundreds of Ice Age fossils that inspired the recreation of a barren, cold plain from 30,000 years ago. In an adjacent room, pieces from the Naturalis collection invite you to explore early life, either on your own or during a guided visit. Binoculars make it possible to stalk the prehistoric animals that populate the scale model – almost as if you're on a safari.

The Earth gallery is an ode to our planet's enormous powers: not just of creation and life-giving, but also of destruction. This place is where you'll travel to sites where you can see and even feel these powers. Volcanoes on Hawaii, earthquakes in Japan, a stone quarry in Brazil, and even the spot where Iceland is splitting in two. Sensational panoramic images on the walls make you feel like you're really there. At each location, you'll meet "fellow travelers" who are touring the area using a Volkswagen van, motor or camper, or staying in a holiday home. By sharing their experiences, they help you understand what planet Earth is capable of.

No visitor will want to skip this gallery, as it features our most prized asset: Trix the T. rex. A few years ago, Naturalis uncovered one of the most complete and best-preserved skeletons of this famous carnivorous dinosaur on the prairie of Montana, USA. Standing ready to pounce, Trix takes you back in time to an age when prehistoric reptiles ruled the planet for 160 million years.

Quite literally, death leads to rebirth. As nature's circle of life treats both equally, it's no wonder that a museum about every aspect of life should devote a gallery to death. Enter the "maze of death" to reach the point where life and death meet. As you wander around the gallery, accompanied by the sound of crows cawing, you come across the many faces of death. The atmosphere is lightened by the occasional appearance of a squirrel, which takes you on some light-hearted mental leaps. For example, does every living thing die? It may even make you question your own place in the universe. The maze of death is also the labyrinth of life.

How did man come to be? Naturalis attempts to answer this sweeping question in an original way. It does so through a set of unique fossils belonging to Homo erectus, one of our earliest ancestors. In the Early humans gallery, their discoverer – Dutch physician and researcher Eugène Dubois (1858–1940) – invites you along on his mission to find the "missing link" between primates and mankind. He was the first to make such an attempt. The journey will take you to Java and make you as determined as a real scientist to find out the truth.

The Seduction gallery is all about procreation in nature. In a playful way, it illustrates the rituals of courting, coupling, and raising offspring. When it comes to seduction, the senses play a major role. How attractive is the smell of a female giraffe's urine? Which flower colors attract bees? What happens after a successful coupling? Do the parents raise their offspring or abandon them? As for the act itself: what "equipment" do different animals and plants use? There's a wealth of information here for those with an interest in such things. In the Seduction gallery, nature is stripped bare.

With its large windows facing the street, Live Science functions as a shop window for Naturalis. This place is where you will meet our researchers and collection managers, so that you can see and experience what their work is all about. Things you can do here include attempting to draw an insect according to scientific rules or witnessing a specimen preparation from up close. The pieces in the collection reflect our institute's rich history from its foundation in 1820 to the present day. They include a hoodwinker sunfish discovered in 1889 and a meteorite that struck the Netherlands only recently.