Exhibition
 Admission with Museum Card
 

Collections from Home and Abroad

Biological Museum, Turku

  • 21.3.2023–

Exhibition Collections from Home and Abroad showcases treasures from the collection of natural sciences.

 

The Turku Museum Centre’s exhibition Collections from Home and Abroad showcases treasures from the collection of natural sciences, donated by private collectors, from exotic butterflies to Finnish school herbaria and from magnificent phasmids to over a century old egg and mineral collections.

The highlight of the exhibition are insects from faraway countries from Lasse Vastamäki’s collection that has already delighted the guests of the Biological Museum before. Among other things, the exhibits include a purple spotted swallowtail living in elevation of 1400 metres in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, South American morpho butterflies and various fascinating beetles. Vastamäki collected and exchanged insects for decades, and the hobby lead into the creation of a beautiful and interesting collection.

The Turku Museum Centre’s collection of natural sciences contains nearly 25,000 specimens, the majority of which are insects. In addition to insects, the highlights of the collection include Finnish plant specimens, bird eggs and minerals, which, in addition to their museal and scientific value, also preserve the heritage of their collectors in the collections. In this exhibition, interesting personal history is represented by, among others, the mineral samples of Fredrik Rauha, a former intendent of the Biological Museum. He used them as a collection from the 1930s through the 1950s when he was a lecturer of natural history and geography at the Turun Lyseo school.

Today, the keeping of many nature collections from both abroad and the Finnish nature is regulated by law in order to safeguard biodiversity. As recently as a hundred years ago, the collection of bird eggs was a fairly common hobby, but in the 1960s it was prohibited by the Nature Conservation Act, and the collection of herbaria included in the curriculum of grammar and folk schools since 1864 had to be discontinued in 1969 when some rare plants had already disappeared completely from certain areas. From the perspective of natural scientific research, old, carefully documented collections form a valuable time series when examining bird nesting or plant species distribution, for example. Even after the passage of centuries, they tell us about their time, changes in the living environment or the loss of species.

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Museum contact details

Biological Museum
Neitsytpolku 1, 20810 Turku

(02) 262 0340

Museum website

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Biological Museum, Neitsytpolku 1, 20810 Turku


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Admission fees

Admission with Museum Card
Admission with Museum Card

7/3,50/2,50/0 €

Payment methods

Yleisimmät pankki- ja luottokortit.

Opening hours

Suljettu väliaikaisesti

Closed: 1.1.–21.5.2024.During the summer open Mon-Sun 10-18

Näyttelyn tekstit kielillä

 

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