It was a coincidence, really. It so happened that my work took me to Twente, the far Eastern corner of the Netherlands, and I saw these posters along the side of the road, advertising a dinosaur exhibition at Natura Docet. Of course, Natura Docet. The local nature museum. That’s here somewhere, isn’t it? Had I not befriended its curator, Eric Mulder, a couple of years ago? I immediately wrote it down and paid a visit to the museum at the…
Aart Walen
Just outside the small town of Boxtel, close to the city of Eindhoven in the South of the Netherlands, lies the Oertijdmuseum, or the Museum of Ancient Time. It’s been on my radar for some time as a destination for all things palaeontological. In 2018, the Oertijdmuseum received national media attention thanks to their acquisition of a Diplodocus skeleton. It is actually a composite of three subadult individuals, collectively named “Kirby”, after their discoverer, Hans-Jakob “Kirby” Siber. The associated information…
Teylers Museum of Haarlem, the Netherlands, has been featured on the blog before, when Marc gave the place his warm-hearted recommendation. In this age, when so many museums in this country want to be full-on sensory experiences and as a result start to look more and more like theme parks, because heaven forbid the kids should get bored, Teylers increasingly seems like the last museum standing. Even now, the Teylers is a most agreeably old-fashined collection of quietly beautiful halls,…
It’s finally done: The new buildings for Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Netherlands’ national natural history museum. Based in the city of Leiden, the museum had been under construction since 2017. The previous incarnation of Naturalis hailed from 1998, after the fusion of some older museums. It was never that heavy on dinosaurs, focusing more on living animals and plants, as well as the rather more recent history of Europe during the last ice age. Dinosaurs made some token appearances, with…