Natural History Museum of Geneva

Brief information

In this museum, natural history is presented not only as a collection of display cases: its symbol has become Janus, a living two-headed tortoise, exhibited since 1997. This kind of exhibit immediately changes the scale of perception: alongside the scientific collections, there is a living creature here that makes the museum memorable not for the number of its halls, but for a specific biological rarity.

The permanent exhibition is arranged as a movement from the nearby to the broader: first regional fauna, then wildlife from the rest of the world, followed by Earth sciences and the history of humankind. The four levels help visitors read the museum not as a random collection of animals and minerals, but as a sequence of themes in which local nature sits alongside global nature and the longer history of the planet.

What to notice right away

It is worth comparing the layout of the floors: regional fauna occupies a separate level, exotic fauna is spread across two floors, and Earth sciences and the history of humankind are set apart in their own sections. This layout shows how the museum distinguishes nearby nature, distant ecosystems, and more general explanations of the origins of the world.

A separate focus is the live exhibits. Janus matters as a rare symbol of the museum, while the history of the leafcutter ants shows that visitors here observed not only individual organisms, but an entire community. The Atta colony was expected in 1977 to be preserved for only a few years, but it lived much longer and grew to hundreds of thousands of individuals. The new giant anthill, presented in 2017, continues the same line: the museum shows nature as a functioning system, not only as a preserved specimen.