Berlin's store of biological specimens are back in the limelight. Nigel Williams reports. Berlin's store of biological specimens are back in the limelight. Nigel Williams reports. More than 200,000 jars containing over a million biological specimens are the new stars of a startling show in the newly restored Berlin Museum of Natural History comprising more than 12 kilometres of dramatically backlit shelving creating an unprecedented public display. The show, the world's largest of its kind, comprises a vast array of species collected over the past two centuries. “In museum terms, this is like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” said Andreas Kunkel, a spokesperson for the museum, which was inspired by the research conducted by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt 200 years ago. “After a break lasting 65 years, we are back in business,” he said. The exhibition marks the re-birth of the Berlin museum, now aiming to resume its place among the world's foremost institutions after a £25 million restoration programme. Its collection includes the world's largest dinosaur skeleton, 25 million mammals, fish, and insects and birds now extinct, collected during Captain Cook's voyages. The institution once rated alongside its counterparts in London and Paris in terms of global scientific importance. It was formally opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889 and was designed to put German natural science firmly on the map. But at the end of the Second World War, an allied air raid destroyed the east wing of the museum. In the following Cold War, the museum was deprived of cash in the then communist sector of the city. “The museum was left badly neglected,” said Kunkel. “Almost nothing was done to it for over six decades.” Chronic underfunding meant that staff were unable to open, let alone catalogue, the museum's specimens. This included the specimens recovered from the world's largest dinosaur dig on record, which took place in 1913 in German east Africa. The plight of the museum prompted researchers in the US, UK, France, Switzerland, and Denmark to join an appeal in 2002 to raise £6.4 million to help rescue the building and restore the collection. The specimens were “part of a national and international cultural heritage,” they argued. But new funding fell foul of bureaucracy between the federal government and the pressed Berlin local government. Only last year, a breakthrough came when the museum was finally classified as one of the country's Leibniz scientific research institutes, funded jointly by regional and central government. The new money has allowed the purchase of sonar-type equipment which enables researchers to examine the contents of hundreds of bamboo crates packed with dinosaur bones that have remained unopened since they were brought by ship almost a century ago. Specimens such as a finely written 16th century log book and museum director Reinhold Lienfelder's personal favourite, a sea-foam-coloured cabinet full of rare corals, have been restored. And items with a darker history, such as the panda that Herman Goering ordered to be prepared for the Berlin 1935 ‘hunting exhibition’ are also on display. Even the remains of a parrot called Jacob, the favourite pet of Alexander von Humboldt, are there. “Animals that are now under the strictest of protections were at one time trophies,” says Ferdinand Damaschun, head of exhibitions. Many items and oddities like the stuffed parrot, collected by researchers around the world, are exhibited for the first time in the show and among them are blown-glass models of jellyfish. The museum's half million visitors per year, along with the many researchers who come from around the globe, can now view and investigate some 270,000 specimens of fish, snakes, snails, frogs and other animals collected over the years. The massive newly restored room, full from floor to ceiling with the illuminated jars of preserved specimens, is undoubtedly the highlight of the museum's anniversary celebration. “These are valuable, irreplaceable cultural assets that have been collected over two centuries and remain indispensable for biological research to this day, and are extensively used internationally,” says Damaschun. “It is a milestone for the preservation of our collections.” he says. For the exhibition — called Klasse, Ordnung, Art — the museum turns the magnifying glass back on itself, exploring the evolution of natural history itself, the changing ideas of collection strategies, and how the country's political history has coloured this past. “We have a lot of curiosities here,” says Damaschun.