Milan’s Museum of Natural History is the Municipality’s oldest Museum. It is one of the most important of its kind in Europe and is today the center of the Giardino delle Scienze’s activities.

 

Founded in 1838 by the Municipality of Milan to host naturalistic collections donated by Milanese aristocrat Giuseppe de Cristoforis and Hungarian botanist Giorgio Jan, it was inaugurated in 1844 in the former convent of S. Marta, then moved to Palazzo Dugnani and then finally to its present location.

 

The exhibition is complete with dioramas and explanatory panels. It includes several sections: mineralogy and petrography, paleontology (with a rich collection of dinosaur skeletons), paleethnology, botany (including the Cormio wood specimen collection regarding wood and its processing), entomology and invertebrate and vertebrate zoology. The specimens of besanosaurus (a 6-metre long marine reptile) and saltriovenator (the first dinosaur appearing in Lombardy) were discovered in the Province of Varese.