Exhibition "Zoological Museum"

About exhibition

The collection of animals on display at the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences comprises roughly 30,000 specimens and is one of the three largest in the world. It includes representatives from all the planet’s oceans and continents, and visitors can take a round-the-world journey without leaving its halls — seeing sharks and lions, whales and kangaroos, a piece of tropical rainforest and a northern bird market. Of greatest interest to visitors are the coral and mollusk exhibits, the unique collection of tropical birds, the collection of marsupial mammals, the vertebrate collections of Central Asia assembled by N. M. Przhevalsky and P. K. Kozlov, and, of course, the “mammoth” hall with the famous Berezovsky mammoth specimen, the skeleton of a southern elephant and mummified baby mammoths whose absolute age is estimated at about 40,000 years. The excellently executed biogroups and dioramas portraying animals in their natural habitats are also consistently popular. The collection contains many species listed in the International Red Data Book, and extinct species are represented as well — the mammoth, Steller’s sea cow, the Tasmanian wolf (thylacine), the Carolina parakeet, and others. The Zoological Museum’s collection has not only scientific but also historical significance, as it traces its origins to Russia’s first museum, the Kunstkamera, founded in 1714.