Museum of Natural History
University of Łódź
ul. Kilińskiego 101
90-011 Łódź
Tel. (42) 665 54 89
muzeum@biol.uni.lodz.pl
https://www.muzeumprzyrodnicze.uni.lodz.pl/
Admission charges (please see the museum website)
The museum is open: Tuesdays – Sundays (please see the website for times).
Group visits (advance booking is essential).
Director: Marek Michalski PhD
Staff: Agnieszka Andrzejczak, Agnieszka Antczak, Elżbieta Bereszczuk, Lidia Dziabas, Paulina Kaczmarczyk MA, Robert Kamiński, lic. Jagoda Łuczyńska, Katarzyna Majecka PhD, Piotr Olszewski PhD, Zuzanna Zaradzka MA.
Today’s Museum of Natural History at the University of Łódź dates back to 1930 when the Museum of Natural History and Pedagogy was established using as its nucleus two institutions operating in Łódź at that time – the Museum of Science and Art and the Central Municipal Laboratory of Natural History and Pedagogy. The founder and first
director of the pre-war museum was Edward Potęga. It was located in the former canteen building in Sienkiewicz Park at ul. Kilińskiego in Łódź and is still the seat of today’s Museum of Natural History. In the interwar period the museum had a primarily educational function serving schools in Łódź and it was also the seat of the editorial offices of a number of
local natural history journals. During the Second World War the museum was headed by a German, Ernst Koeppen, a specialist in natural history museums. He gave the exhibitions a distinctly regional character and amassed a large collection of vertebrates originating from areas in the vicinity of Łódź. In the years 1945–1950 the museum continued to be an independent educational institution. In 1952 it was transformed into a branch of the Institute of Zoology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Polska Akademia Nauk), and later, in 1962, it was incorporated into the University of Łódź as a part of the Faculty of Evolutionary Biology, which functioned at that time. Today’s Museum of Natural History operates within the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection at the University of Łódź, as a part of the Department of Experimental Zoology and Evolutionary Biology. Over the years, the museum has been proactively amassing new exhibits and collections. A number of the current exhibits are of historical value and date back to the pre-war period. The collection includes items which are rarely found in Polish museums of natural history. There are more than 100,000 exhibits with insects being the most numerous. In 2018 work was completed on expanding and modernizing the museum as a result of which a large educational and cultural centre with modern exhibitions promoting natural history has been created. The considerably larger exhibition and storage space (approx. 800 sq. metres in total) will enable the organization of new exhibitions as well as proper storage and preservation of the collections.
