📸 Picture of our facade by a chimney sweep (!), who was working across the street!
Do you know what is hiding behind our brown facade? The whole world! Shielded from sunlight and heat, you will find a great part our natural sciences collections there. One of the largest in Europe: 38 million specimens, from the four corners of the world. Each and every one of them bears witness to what lives, may soon no longer live, and what once has lived.
So imagine storage rooms with rows of oak cupboards crammed with carefully described insects, rooms with shelves full of invertebrates preserved in alcohol, drawers with vertebrates, and anthropological collections including Neanderthals found in Belgium... And of course we also have fossil collections - from trilobites to dinosaurs - and geological collections, with minerals and meteorites.
These collections are the result of many decades of exploration and research, and help us better understand the history of life on Earth, and to come up with better ways of protecting the biodiversity and geological diversity today. With modern technology (DNA analysis, imaging techniques, ...) scientists are making new discoveries about this natural heritage.
Check out (a small part) of our collections in high res on virtualcollections.naturalsciences.be
[picture: @rooftopvermandel, Instragram]