The Galați Museum of Natural Sciences (Muzeul de Științele Naturii Galați) is a natural history museum inside the Galați Botanical Garden, with exhibitions drawn from collections of zoology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology and other natural sciences. The same building also contains an aquarium, planetarium and astronomical observatory, making it the main indoor attraction of the wider Răsvan Angheluță Natural Sciences Museum Complex.
History
The museum traces its origins to 1939, when the Cuza Vodă Museum opened with collections that included material donated by V.A. Urechia and teachers Paul and Ecaterina Pașa. The Pașa collection, which contained fossils, minerals, birds and mammals, became particularly important to the development of a dedicated natural sciences section. After several years in which the collections shared space with the art museum, the Museum of Natural Sciences became an independent institution in the 1950s.
Its exhibitions moved several times during the following decades. A museum near the Mihai Eminescu Park displayed Romanian fauna in dioramas and briefly operated an aquarium elsewhere on the Danube waterfront, but the building deteriorated and closed in 1972. A new exhibition opened on Strada Domnească in 1978, concentrating particularly on the ecology of birds from southeastern Romania, and remained there until the collections were transferred to the present site around 2000. The new museum building opened to the public in 2003 as part of the developing Botanical Garden complex.
Collections And Visiting
The museum now holds more than 80,000 specimens divided among nine scientific collections. These range from insects, birds, mammals and mollusks to minerals, fossils, skeletons and preserved anatomical material, with both Romanian specimens and material from other parts of the world. Entomology forms the largest collection, while the paleontology holdings include fossils of mammoths, prehistoric bison and other extinct animals found in Romania.
In the basement, the aquarium presents fish and other aquatic life from the lower Danube basin alongside Mediterranean and tropical freshwater species. The second floor contains the planetarium, opened with the museum in 2003 and equipped with a seven-meter projection dome, while the astronomical observatory allows solar and night-sky observations when conditions permit.
Admission to the museum complex includes the museum itself, the aquarium and Botanical Garden, while the astronomy facilities have separate visiting arrangements.
