SR, Bratislava: Prehistory Comes Alive

During your visit of the Slovakian capital you should see the largest natural science museum in Slovakia. You can find it easy! It lies on the riverbank of Danube right by a harbor. It wouldn’t be easy to inspect it whole, because there are more than 2.5 million items. This time we invite you to see only a part of the Natural Science Museum in Bratislava, which is most visited. Its exposition The Tale of the Life on Earth was the last missing exposition in the Biodiversity Project. Recently will visitor learn not only about fauna and flora and about their environment where they live, but even how it all began.

A place when prehistory comes alive
On 300 m² there is a very interesting and instructive exposition about the evolution of life and variety of long-extinct species of Earth. The exposition is divided in three parts. First begins with the appearance of first living organism in the Precambrian (3500 million years ago), continues through the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, Tertiary and ends in the Quaternary Period when recent forms of life appeared (10 thousand years ago). The exposition shows visitor evolution processes and presents main animal and vegetable species in given geological periods.

Children and also grown-ups can see genuine petrified remains of animals and plants that are showing a variety of long-gone worlds. In the exposition there is more than 600 pieces. Some of them are visible by a bare eye, however, other can have more than 2 meters. Visual and 3-D models of environment in the Paleozoic Era and unique over life-size models complete the exposition of the Prehistoric Era. A dinosaur model was presented to public for the first time. It was built on 200 milion years old fragments in rocks in High Tatras. And there is more. You can find here also a one-meter long water scorpion, which lived around 425 million years ago. Also you can see a life-size mammoth from an ice age.

             
Every time you stop in front of some geological display you are accompanied by an interactive screen where you can learn something about a geological time, about movement of continents, or about an environment that Earth had millions of years ago. If your feet are tired, you can comfortably sit in a small cinema (as we did) and, during your rest, you will see a documentary on a discovery of mammoth in Slovakia. Fans of paintings will also appreciate the museum, however, not directly. On one wall hangs a original painting of old ages by Zdeněk Burian.

Our guide told us that up to 99% of exposed items are belongings of Slovak National Museum. After our first entrance in the museum, the exposition seemed small to us. The opposite was true. We had a lot of work to try and study everything we saw. A pleasant surprise was the end of exposition, since it smoothly entered into another exposition and so on. Simply put, it had been an informative experience and you, our readers, should try it too. A winter is an ideal time to visit the museum. Out on the street is a freezing cold weather, but you can comfortably discover secrets of old past. Bad weather will not spoil your experience, that’s for sure.

Text and photo: Oskar Mažgút