MÜNSTER: The Zoological Collections of the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster

Abstract

The zoological collections of the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster date back to the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, the focus on collecting objects of importance to the natural history of the region ``Westphalia'' remains. The collection contains more than one million specimens of insects; the majority belongs to the orders Coleoptera, Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera. Among the different kinds of invertebrate collections, there is a collection of 100,000 spiders. The vertebrate collections, for example, contain more than 26,000 objects within the bird collection and 13,000 objects within the mammalian collection.