It was once seafarers who brought beetles, birds, snails, whales, seals and much more back to Hamburg from their expeditions around the world. From 1891, some of these valuable collections were exhibited in the then new Hamburg Natural History Museum. The exhibition in the magnificent Wilhelmine building at the main railway station was a crowd-puller. In 1943, during the Second World War, the museum was reduced to rubble during Operation Gomorrah. Some of the collections were saved. The extensive alcohol collection survived the firestorm in empty underground railway shafts, the bird collection in a castle in Saxony. In 1969, the collections came into the possession of the University of Hamburg.
The Natural History Museum had been founded exactly a century earlier, in May 1843, at the instigation of the Natural History Society in Hamburg. The first exhibitions were held in 1844 for members of the association and school classes in the new Johanneum building on Speersort. Within a few decades, the collections multiplied, partly through the purchase of private collections. These included the important collections of Peter Friedrich Röding (1767-1846) and parts of the holdings of the shipowner Johan Cesar VI Godeffroy (1813-1885).
After the ruins of the destroyed Natural History Museum were demolished in 1951, various efforts were made to rebuild the Natural History Museum, but almost all of them failed. Finally, in 2016, the Centre for Natural History was founded within the University of Hamburg under the direction of Prof. Dr Matthias Glaubrecht. The scientific collections were expanded and the exhibition areas restructured.
Following the merger in 2021 of the Centre for Natural History at the University of Hamburg with the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn to form the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), the construction of a new research museum is a done deal. Almost 80 years after the destruction of the Natural History Museum, the City of Hamburg has decided in favour of the location. This innovative place of research, collection and exhibition with the areas of zoology, palaeontology, geology and mineralogy will be built in the Hafencity. The current Museum der Natur Hamburg will thus become the Evolutioneum.