Official address:
Museum d'Histoire Naturelle de la ville de Berne NMBE
Département des Vertébrés
Bernastrasse 15
CH-3005 Berne
Switzerland
Phone: +41 31 350' 71' 11
Fax: +41 31 350' 74' 99
Contact
Internet
Curator:
Lüps, Peter, Dr., Curator Dept. vertebrate animals
[email protected]
Schmid, Paul, Dr., Asst. (mammalogy),
[email protected]
Tel: +41 22 418 63 20
Fax: +41 22 418 63 01
The Natural History Museum is owned by the Burgher Community of Berne. Founded in the early years of the 19th century, it is internationally renowned for
its most important diorama displays in Europe showing Swiss and foreign birds and mammals in their natural surroundings. It also houses an outstanding
collection of minerals which include superb rock crystals from the Swiss Alps as well as an exquisite gemstone cabinet.
Worth mentioning are the modern educational collections on zoological and geological subjects and special exhibitions informing the public of new aspects in
natural history.
A considerable part of the collection are animals found dead by people or items from hunters, game wardens, biologists working on projects, government authorities (police, customs, etc). Those collections focus quite naturally mainly on animals from the local area. The large sample of endemic animals (badgers, ibex, etc.) are mainly the result of scientific projects and were not randomly collected. Here's a few numbers to give you an approximative size of the Vertebrate collections: Mounted animals: 6,000; Skins and Furs: 10,000; Skulls: 11,500; Skeletons: 1,500; Fluid Specimens: 6,000 .
Les marmottes sont représentées par 3 espèces et plus de 113 spécimens.
Thanks to Beatrice Blöchlinger, [email protected]