Natural Sciences Museum of Târgu Mureș

The Natural Sciences Museum occupies a neoclassical building with Italian Renaissance elements at 24 Horea Street, Târgu Mureș. The pediment carries a sculpture group by József Róna, and the stained glass in the stairwell was made in István Forgó's workshop. The building was designed by the architect István Kiss for the Székely Land Industrial Museum, and work began in 1890. The industrial museum, inaugurated in 1893, operated here until 1944, after which the building became a school boarding house. Exhibitions returned in 1957, and the natural sciences section was founded in 1988, when its core exhibition opened with specimens prepared in the museum's own taxidermy workshop. Between 2017 and 2023 the building was refurbished with EU funding under the Regional Operational Programme, and the museum reopened on 14 December 2023 with a new permanent exhibition. The skeleton of a woolly rhinoceros, estimated at about 50,000 years old and brought from Siberia, stands at the entrance. The ground-floor rooms show minerals and rocks, fossils from Mureș County and the Transylvanian Basin, and the diorama "Life in the Mureș River". Upstairs are a hunting trophy hall, a virtual cave, a room on legally protected plants and a temporary exhibition room. The refurbishment project also included a greenhouse with exotic plants and a sensory garden. The building is a listed historic monument (LMI code MS-II-m-A-15510). The museum is run by the Mureș County Museum and is open to the public.