Kotel Natural History museum, Natural history museum in Kotel, Bulgaria.

Kotel Natural History Museum occupies a purpose-built structure opened in 1981, covering 1,000 m² in Kotel, Bulgaria. Its roughly 30,000 specimens from the Eastern Balkan Mountains are arranged by theme: invertebrate fossils, higher plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. The paleontology hall alone displays over 100 invertebrate fossils, including corals, bivalves, snails and ammonites from the Mesozoic era.

Vasil Georgiev, a local teacher, spent 60 years collecting fossils, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds around Kotel, and in 1924 exhibited 500 specimens in Sofia. After a Bulgarian Academy of Sciences commission led by Dr Neno Atanasov reviewed his collections, it proposed a natural history museum in 1951. The museum was founded in 1952, and the present building, designed with zoologist Nikolay Boev of the Academy, opened in 1981.

The museum displays local wildlife and plants of the region arranged in realistic natural settings, allowing visitors to see how different species live together. The exhibitions help people understand and appreciate the nature of the Balkan area.

The museum is housed in a building that is easy to reach on foot and contains several exhibition halls organized logically by scientific topics. Visitors can walk through the different rooms at their own pace and learn about the area's natural history.

The paleontology section holds a remarkable collection of over 100 fossil species from the Mesozoic era, including corals, snails, ammonites, and other marine remains. These rare pieces reveal that the region was once covered by seas before mountain formation occurred.