Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo

Brief information

The museum grew out of the Botanical Garden, founded by the Toyen estate in 1814. That is why the place reads not as a single hall with display cases, but as a university grounds where living nature, the animal world, and geology have ended up side by side. The zoological, botanical, and geological museums were added about a hundred years later: the campus in central Oslo had become too cramped for such collections.

Later, the separate museums and the garden were united into one structure, and the current name appeared in 2005. This fact helps you view the place without expecting one single “main” exhibit: its meaning lies in the proximity of different ways of studying nature — plants grow in the garden and greenhouses, animals are presented in the zoological section, and rocks, minerals, and fossils show deeper time.

What to notice first

It makes sense to compare the museum’s three physical parts. The Botanical Garden, with two exhibition greenhouses, shows a living collection: plants here matter not only as decoration, but as university material for observation and classification. The Zoological Museum is organized around the wildlife of Norway and the world, so the local and the global scale appear side by side.

The geological section changes the pace of the visit: instead of living organisms, there are fossils, rocks, and minerals here. Importantly, some specimens are displayed in both the Geological and Zoological museums. This cross-reference explains the structure of the whole place: one and the same natural object can be read as part of life and as a trace in stone. The fossil Darwinius masillae “Ida,” an Eocene primate, shows this shift in perspective especially well.