The history of the collections began in 1700 after the palace fire in Weimar with the purchase of part of Christian Lorenz von Adlershelm’s natural history cabinet by Duke Wilhelm Ernst von Weimar, who reigned from 1683 to 1728. Some of the particularly attractive pieces on display in today’s exhibition, such as the whale bones, date from this period. These pieces were initially housed in the art and natural history cabinet in the palace in Weimar, but were expanded through the purchase of fossils, which are also in our collection, and moved to rooms in the city palace due to lack of space, forming the basis of the Ducal Museum in Jena. In 1779, the Walch Natural History Cabinet was purchased by Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar. In 1839, the museum – now increasingly used for teaching purposes – comprised 2,073 collection numbers, including 39 mammal and 524 bird specimens.

Goethe had a direct influence on the institution for many years. From this period and the first years of the Kunstkammer, the Phyletisches Museum still has fossils, whale bones and the skeleton of the aurochs, which Goethe also worked on and which served Bojanus in 1827 as the basis for his first description of the primeval bull Bos primigenius.

In 1850, under the direction of Oscar Schmidt, the museum was separated from the “Mineralogical Cabinet”. The “Zoological Museum” thus became an independent