Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Push through the heavy doors and the air changes. The traffic noise of Invalidenstraße drops away, and the floor gives off a soft, cool echo. Then you look up. A neck of pale bone rises far above your head, higher than the windows. For a moment the room feels too small for the creature standing in it.

Welcome to the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin's natural history museum. It sits on a long, busy street in the district of Mitte, between the main railway station and the old northern edge of the city centre. From outside, it looks like a government ministry, with a grand stone façade and tall windows. Inside, it holds one of the largest natural history collections in the world. It counts its objects in the tens of millions, and only a tiny fraction is ever on display.

The collections are older than this building. They began in the early nineteenth century, when Berlin's university was founded in 1810 and gathered its zoological, mineral and fossil collections. For decades those collections lived inside the university. As they grew, they needed a home of their own. This purpose-built museum opened in 1889, during the age of Germany's new empire. Its grand style was meant to show that science had a serious place in the capital.

Now, back to the giant in the central hall. This is Giraffatitan brancai, a long-necked plant-eating dinosaur. For many years scientists called it Brachiosaurus, and you may still hear that name. Its mounted skeleton stands about thirteen metres tall. It is recognised as one of the tallest mounted dinosaur skeletons anywhere. Stand at its feet and follow the line of the neck upward. The head sits roughly at the height of a four-storey building.

Here is the part many visitors miss. These bones did not come from Europe. They came from Tendaguru, a fossil site in what is now Tanzania, in East Africa. In the early twentieth century, when the region was a German colony, expeditions dug there for several years. Hundreds of local workers excavated the bones and carried tonnes of fossils on foot to the coast for shipping. Today the museum openly discusses this colonial history, and research into it continues. The skeleton is a scientific treasure, and also a record of a difficult past.

As you walk around the hall, look for the binocular viewers set at eye level. The museum calls them Jurascopes. Look through one, and the bare skeleton in front of you gains muscles, skin and movement. The dinosaur walks again in its ancient landscape. It is a simple idea, and it works for adults as well as children. It also shows how much of a dinosaur's appearance is careful scientific reconstruction.

Not far away, in a small and quiet display, lies something much smaller and possibly more important. This is the Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx. It is a creature about the size of a crow, pressed into fine pale limestone from Bavaria in southern Germany. You can see the outline of feathers clearly. You can also see teeth, claws on the wings and a long bony tail. That mix of bird and reptile made Archaeopteryx a central piece of evidence in the debates about evolution in the late nineteenth century. Many scientists consider this specimen one of the finest ever found.

Now let us move to a very different room. In the east wing, behind tall walls of glass, shelves rise from floor to ceiling. They are filled with jars of every size. Inside the jars, fish, frogs, snakes, octopuses and countless other animals float in alcohol. This is the wet collection, and it holds hundreds of thousands of jars. Under the cool, bluish light, the effect is strange and quiet, almost like a library of bodies.

This wing has its own story. In the final months of the Second World War, bombing destroyed much of the east side of the building. For decades afterwards, the damaged section stood as a ruin. Its rebuilding was completed only in the early twenty-first century, and it reopened with this glass-walled store at its heart. Look closely at the outside walls when you leave. In places you can see the difference between old stone and newer construction.

In other halls, you will meet some famous Berliners. Knut, the polar bear cub who became a celebrity at Berlin Zoo in the 2000s, is preserved here. So is Bobby, a gorilla who lived at the same zoo in the early twentieth century and drew large crowds. Locals of a certain age often stop in front of these animals with real affection. They are reminders that this museum is tied to the city's own memories, not only to distant jungles and deserts.

Upstairs and along the side galleries, the mood changes again. The mineral hall keeps a more traditional feel, with long rows of wooden and glass cabinets. Crystals of deep purple, green and gold catch the light from the windows. Nearby, the museum shows meteorites, rocks that fell to Earth from space. Some visitors walk past them quickly. But it is worth pausing. These dark, heavy stones are among the oldest objects you can see anywhere in Berlin.

The museum is not only a place of display. It is also an active research institute. Scientists here study biodiversity, evolution and the history of the Earth. Most of the collection lives behind closed doors in storage rooms and laboratories. In recent years, the museum has also opened parts of its work to the public, so visitors can sometimes watch preparation work or digitisation in progress. Keep an eye out for windows and open workspaces as you walk.

When you step back out onto Invalidenstraße, take a moment on the pavement. The trams rattle past, and the street smells of exhaust and coffee. Behind you, the stone façade looks calm and ordinary again. It is hard to believe that, a few metres away, a dinosaur from East Africa is standing in the dark, its head close to the ceiling. Carry that picture with you as you walk on into the city.