Muzeum Ewolucji, Warszawa

Muzeum Ewolucji is Warsaw’s museum of evolution and palaeontology, located in the Palace of Culture and Science. Its displays trace discoveries from the Gobi Desert and Poland, with major dinosaur skeletons, changing Tarbosaurus reconstructions, Triassic animals from Krasiejów, and Lucy, an Australopithecus reconstruction.

Muzeum Ewolucji is a museum devoted to evolution and palaeontology, housed in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. It serves as the public exhibition space of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ zoological and palaeobiological institutions. The story begins with a Gobi Desert dinosaur exhibition, organised by Professor Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska in nineteen sixty-eight; it remained open until nineteen eighty-four.

The museum itself was created in nineteen eighty-four, and its permanent land-evolution exhibition opened the following year. A giant skeletal reconstruction of the plant-eating sauropod Opisthocoelicaudia almost fills the main gallery. Its skull comes from Nemegtosaurus, found nearby in the Gobi, although palaeontologists dispute whether skull and skeleton belonged to separate animals.

Most dinosaur skeletons here came from Polish-Mongolian expeditions of the nineteen sixties and seventies led by Kielan-Jaworowska. The Tarbosaurus displays capture a change in scientific thinking: one mount holds the spine level with the ground, while an older reconstruction gives the animal a kangaroo-like pose. The collection also follows Polish discoveries, including Triassic reptiles and amphibians from Krasiejów, and a reconstruction of Lucy, the Australopithecus specimen.