Fuhlrott-Museum, Natural history museum in Wuppertal, Germany.
The Fuhlrott-Museum was a natural history museum in Wuppertal. Its permanent exhibition showed local fauna through numerous mounted animals and the evolution of species, alongside fossils, minerals and some live animals; two further rooms held temporary exhibitions on a single theme, occasionally ethnographic. The collection comprised 60,000 fossils and minerals, 220,000 beetles, other insects and bird specimens.
The museum traces back to collections from the Natural History Society of Elberfeld-Barmen, which were brought together in 1892. After more than a century of public access, it closed permanently in 2008.
The museum was named after Johann Carl Fuhlrott, the naturalist who first identified the skull bones found in the Neandertal as the remains of Homo neanderthalensis. Its permanent exhibition showed the local fauna through numerous mounted animals and traced the evolution of species, while two rooms hosted temporary displays that sometimes covered ethnographic themes.
The former museum stood at the corner of Auer Schulstraße and Friedrich-Ebert-Straße, a few hundred metres west of Elberfeld's centre. Since 2008 the complex has housed the Bergische Volkshochschule and the Wuppertaler Medienzentrum, so the exhibition rooms are not open to visitors. The natural history collections were dispersed as loans and later gifts to other museums.
The museum's name honours Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who led the Natural Science Society of Elberfeld and Barmen and was the first scholar to recognise the Neandertal skull bones as remains of another human type, Homo neanderthalensis. The society's collection, founded in 1846, became the museum in 1892.
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