State Darwin Museum in Moscow
Darwin Museum occupies a special place among Moscow museums. It presents to visitors one of the largest natural science collections in Europe. Permanent expositions and exhibitions tell about the origin of life on Earth, the paths of natural selection and the evolution of living things.
Video: Darwin Museum
ContentsHighlights
The museum staff conducts special programs for preschool children and schoolchildren interested in biology. In addition, every year the Darwin Museum gathers many guests for mass celebrations – World Water Day, International Bird Day, World Environment Day, and International Earth Day.
Expositions of the Darwin Museum
The Darwin Museum occupies a spacious three-story building, which was built especially for it in 1995. Its halls contain showcases, stands with stuffed animals and skeletons, moulages and various interactive exhibits.
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In the spacious central hall a unique installation “Living Planet” has been created. With the help of sound, light and volumetric images, the history of the origin of the Universe and life on our planet is reproduced in front of the audience for 20 minutes. During the installation, the walls of the hall turn into a giant screen with a panoramic image that can be viewed from any floor of the Darwin Museum.
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Almost all the halls have special audio installations reproducing the voices of birds and sounds made by animals. On large screens visitors are shown short movies about nature. There are also other multimedia elements: “living scales”, “singing” bumblebee and frog, as well as interactive guides on thematic sections of the exposition. Portholes are built into the floor, through which fossils from the Cretaceous period and traces of baby dinosaurs can be seen.
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In 2015, a Paleopark was created on an open area next to the Darwin Museum building. In the green courtyard, full-size models of eight ancient extinct animals that once inhabited the territory of Russia were installed. In the Paleopark you can see a mammoth, an amurosaurus, a kelesque, a mastodonsaurus, a cave lion, a woolly rhinoceros, a ponderichthys and an estemmenosuchus. Ferns, ginkgoes and other relict plants typical of the age of dinosaurs are planted between the models.
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Children’s Programs
For families with children, the Darwin Museum staff conducts special themed weekend excursions: “In the World of Ancient Animals”, “Animals as Heroes of Russian Folk Tales”, “I’m Not Afraid of You”, “The Life of Ancient Man” and others. To make it interesting for children, they published an original guidebook “Merry Museum”, composed of riddles, poems, unusual comparisons and entertaining pictures.
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Visitor Information
For young and adult visitors, the doors of the Darwin Museum are open any day, except Monday, from 10.00 to 18.00. The ticket office closes half an hour earlier. On the third Sunday of each month the entrance to the museum is free, and on the last Friday of the month the building is closed for a sanitary day.
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The Living Planet installation takes place weekdays at 4 p.m. and weekends at 12 noon, 2:30 p.m., and 4:30 p.m.
. During the summer months, it can be seen weekdays at 2 p.m. and weekends at 12 noon and 4 p.m..How to get there
The building of the Darwin Museum is located at the intersection of Vavilova Street and Dmitri Ulyanov Street at 57 Vavilova Street. It can be reached in 10 minutes on foot from the metro station “Akademicheskaya”. From the metro station “Universitet” to the Darwin Museum there are streetcars #14 and 39.
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