Natural Sciences Museum, Suceava

The Natural Sciences Museum stands at Strada Ștefan cel Mare nr. 23, in the Professor Ioan Nemeș Park (the Central Park) in central Suceava, and is managed by the Bukovina National Museum. The building was erected between 1811 and 1814 as the seat of the elementary school (Hauptschule). In 1976 it was taken over by the Suceava County Museum, which set up the museum here in 1976-1977; between 1992 and 2000 it was restored and modernised and the exhibition was redone. The building has a ground floor and an upper floor with symmetrically arranged rooms, and an entrance with four pillars forming five arches, topped by a balcony. It is bordered to the north and east by the park and to the south by the Roman Catholic church of St John of Nepomuk. In front of the museum grows a copper beech (Fagus sylvatica var. atropurpurea) about 25 m tall, protected as a natural monument. The main exhibition, on the upper floor, covers mineralogy, petrography, palaeobotany, palaeozoology, botany, malacology, entomology, ornithology and mammalogy. At the end of 1987 the collection numbered almost 110,000 items. The Crystal Room shows the museum's finest mineral specimens, while other rooms display leaf imprints and fragments of extinct animals. The dioramas "Herd of wild boar", "Brown bear of Bukovina", "Red deer rut" and "Wolf pack in winter" are accompanied by recordings of animal sounds. The museum also has the 360-degree projection "Among the dinosaurs", an interactive floor, the "Flora of Bukovina" herbarium and a small aquarium display at the entrance, and is open Tuesday to Sunday.