COBURG: Naturkunde-Museum Coburg—Paleontological Collections

Abstract

12.1 The Museum The Naturkunde-Museum Coburg is located in the Hofgarten, a landscape park of the nineteenth century in the English style, between the castle of Veste Coburg and Ehrenburg Palace. The museum was founded in 1844 by Duke Ernst II. of Sachsen- Coburg and Gotha and Prince Consort Albert as ‘Herzogliches Naturaliencabinet’. But the collections date back to the eighteenth century. The present museum build- ing has 4800 m 2 of usable floor space, with 2200 m 2 for exhibitions, including 13 halls with the following fields: mineralogy, rocks, earth history (250 m 2 ), animals of Central Europe and North America, invertebrates, birds, prehistoric and protohis- toric archaeology, ethnology, and museum’s history. The collections comprise more than one million specimens. The legal owner of the collections is the Coburger Landesstiftung, which has been supported by the Free State of Bavaria since 1920. Before that they were the property of the Coburg dukes. (Fig. 12.1)