Naturmuseum Senckenberg, Frankfurt (must see)

The Naturmuseum Senckenberg is a natural history museum, and it's the second-largest of its kind in Germany. It's particularly popular among children because of its extensive collection of dinosaur fossils, which is the largest exhibition of large dinosaurs in Europe. One remarkable exhibit in the museum features a dinosaur fossil with well-preserved scaled skin.

Inside the museum, you'll find a vast and diverse collection of birds, including 90,000 bird skins, 5,050 egg sets, 17,000 skeletons, and 3,375 spirit specimens. In 2010, nearly 517,000 people visited the museum.

Today at the museum, you'll encounter life-size dinosaur recreations outside, crafted using the latest scientific knowledge. Inside, follow Titanosaurus tracks on the floor to its skeleton on a covered patio.

Some of the main attractions at the museum include a Diplodocus (donated by the American Museum of Natural History in 1907), the crested Hadrosaur Parasaurolophus, a fossilized Psittacosaurus with visible bristles around its tail and fossilized stomach contents, and an Oviraptor. The Tyrannosaurus rex, an original Iguanodon, and the museum's mascot, the Triceratops, are also big crowd-pleasers.

While the dinosaurs draw the most attention due to their size, the Senckenberg Museum also houses a comprehensive collection of animal exhibits from different epochs in Earth's history. For instance, there are original specimens from the Messel pit, such as field mice, reptiles, fish, and a prehistoric horse that lived approximately 50 million years ago and stood less than 60 centimeters tall.

One of the museum's unique features in Europe is a cast of Lucy, an almost complete skeleton of the upright hominid Australopithecus afarensis. The upper levels of the museum are adorned with historical cabinets filled with stuffed animals, including one of only twenty known examples of the quagga, an extinct animal since 1883.

Since its remodeling in 2003, the museum's new reptile exhibit addresses both the biodiversity of reptiles and amphibians and the topic of nature conservation. An accessible rainforest tree provides views of various zones within the rainforest, from the forest floor to the canopy, showcasing the habitats to which exotic reptiles have adapted.

The Senckenberg Museum also hosts regular evening lectures and tours, including a notable lecture by Alfred Wegener on January 6, 1912, which marked the first public presentation of the theory of Continental Drift.