Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum, Paleontological museum in Solnhofen, Germany.
The Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum is a fossil museum displaying remains from the Jurassic period, including multiple Archaeopteryx specimens and the skeleton of a young Sciurumimus dinosaur. The collection also features other sea creatures and plants from the same ancient rock layers.
Friedrich Müller, a fossil collector and sometime mayor of Solnhofen, showed his private collection of Plattenkalk finds to the public in 1954 and, unlike other regional collectors, kept and enlarged it rather than selling. The municipality founded the museum named after him in 1968, it opened in 1970, and it was substantially expanded in 1986.
The museum reflects how local limestone quarries have attracted collectors and researchers for generations, making this region central to fossil science. Visitors can see how the extraction of these stones shaped the area's identity.
The museum is located within walking distance from Solnhofen's town center and is easy to access on foot. Visitors should plan to spend a couple of hours to explore the collections comfortably.
The museum holds the original of the "Paintener Eichhörnchen", the predatory dinosaur Sciurumimus from Painten, on permanent loan; its tail earned it the nickname. It also displays the world's largest lithograph and the tools of a Hackstockmeister, alongside casts of the Solnhofen Archaeopteryx specimens kept in Berlin and London.
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