Germany Highlights 2024: Berlin Part 3

We spent the majority of our last day at Berlin’s Natural History Museum. There was a tram straight from our neighbourhood to the museum. When we got off the tram, we saw a beautiful wildflower garden. It was called the “Pollinator Pathway” and was designed to be a “living sculpture” which provided the maximum amount of pollinating plants that would bloom at various times of year. It was meant to bring awareness to the population collapse of many pollinating species such as bees, flies, and butterflies. While we were walking through this garden, we saw several species of bees, hoverflies, and other flies making use of the plants. 

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but the architecture of this building was also beautiful. Marble, fluted columns, statues of important German naturalists. The thing about classical architecture is that it is beautiful, grand, imposing, but still welcoming and relatable at a human scale, something which much of modern architecture has failed to capture. 

Once we got inside, the first exhibit hall was about dinosaurs. My inner child never gave up on dinos. They are still super cool. The centerpiece was 3 skeletons of long-necked dinosaurs: Giraffatitan (originally described as a brachiosaurus but the genus was later changed), Diplodocus, and Dicraeosaurus. There was also a Kentrosaurus which I had never heard of before, but it was a smaller, spikier cousin of the famous Stegosaurus. 

They also had a wall of smaller fossils, mainly sea life. This included fossilized snails, clams, worms, turtles, and fish. One of the fish fossils in particular caught my eye, that of a Lepidotes maximus. It had been so well polished that you could make out the shine of the fossilized scales. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I’ll save you a few paragraphs and show you:

Continuing with the dinosaurs, they also had a fairly intact Tyrannosaurus rex skull as well as an almost complete T. rex skeleton. Nearby was a stuffed chick to show just how far birds have derived from their dinosaur ancestors.

The rest of the museum included exhibits on earth sciences, geology, mineralogy, taxidermy, poaching, and the gift shop. I almost ended up buying a German field guide to birds which would have FORCED me to learn the language, but I ended up resisting. Now that I’m home, that book keeps running through my head. Should I buy the German bird guide? My biologist friend thinks I should. It would be kind of funny if I knew the Latin names and German names for birds but not their English names. 

By the time we made it about 75% of the way through the museum, my wife and I could barely read anything. We had spent the last several days voraciously reading plaques, displays, pamphlets, tour guides, and more. It’s unusual for us to go to a museum and skip exhibits, but when we got to the mineral exhibit, all we wanted to do was just look at pretty rocks. Several silicate minerals look strange and fuzzy, which neither of us liked. My wife ended up getting some blue celestine instead. 

With that, our trip came to an end. We rode the train from Berlin back to Witzenhausen to say goodbye to our friends, say goodbye to Cherry City, enjoy our last true German meal (a cold meat salad called fleischsalad), and then prepare for the long flight home.

I realize that 2 weeks barely scratches the surface for Germany. We probably could have spent a month just in Berlin absorbing everything. Considering how small the country is, it fits in so much history and culture that I might need to take off an entire year to experience everything. That’s unlikely to happen, but I will keep praying for a big lottery win. Until then, I will plan my return trip and continue learning their language.

Something I didn’t touch on in these last few posts were some of the big cultural differences between Germany and Western Canada. I will discuss those in my final post of the series.