The Natural History Museum of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences Krakow
Museums
ul. Św. Sebastiana 9, 31-049 Kraków
Tourist region: Kraków i okolice
tel. +48 124225959
fax. +48 124312720
tel. +48 124228937
fax. +48 124312720
tel. +48 124228937
The collection of the Natural History Museum of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow comprises over two million specimens. The most valuable of these include a unique, approximately 30,000-year-old specimen of a woolly rhinoceros from Starunia, in the eastern Subcarpathian region, and a 14,000-year-old mammoth skull of Mammuthus primigenius from Bzianka, near Rzeszów.
Here, you can see what no longer exists today – several extinct animal species - and learn about evolutionary processes and mutations in this extraordinary place. In the permanent exhibition "Molluscs of the World", you can become acquainted with long gone ammonites and their worldwide still living modern cephalopods, bivalves, and snails. In turn, "Conversation with Stone" is an exhibition of minerals and fossils donated to the Museum by Zbylut Grzywacz, a painter, graphic artist and collector. "The World of Mammoth Hunters. Paleolithic - Nature and Art" is a permanent exhibition presenting fossil remains of extinct animals belonging to the so-called ‘Pleistocene megafauna’, including mammoths, cave bears and giant deer. The most valuable specimen is the aforementioned woolly rhinoceros, the biggest herbivore of the Ice Age next to the mammoth. It is the only specimen of a rhinoceros preserved in its entirety with skin. It is about 30 thousand years old.