2 billion years back to the first proteins

For its first year of opening, the new Muséum d'histoire naturelle of Toulouse allowed 320,000 visitors in 2008 while his predecessor, founded in 1865, received more than 40,000 during his last year in 1997. It took ten years of work to refounding the new settlement at the site of the former, at the edge of the Jardin des plantes, and doubled its surface to 6,000 square metres. Architect Jean-Paul Viguier drew a curve 120 metre long glass facade, that embraces the Botanical Garden spiral cultivated by the université Paul Sabatier. Is original, the Museum has a second Garden in the new district of Borderouge North of Toulouse, where the city has reconstructed a "garden of the world" and built a shadehouse wood aquatic plants and undergrowth vegetation. "The Museum and its gardens are a full body which deals with the relationship between man, nature and the environment, explains the Director Jean-François Lapeyre." We wanted to create a place of reflection on the life sciences and the impact of humans on the planet. "The whole cost 35 million, funded by the city, three quarters, the Department and the region.

Visit to 5 sequences

The new Museum has retained the cloister in brick from the old convent, covered with a canopy and transformed in lobby. Centre throne "Gypsy", an Asian elephant of circus Pinder naturalized in 1910, airspace by a skeleton reconstituted quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying reptile of 10 metres wide. Institution exposes 7.500 pieces of a rich collection of 2 million objects! Breaking with the old classification of the species in showcases, the new museography selects specimens and questions the visitor with touch screens. Exposure is discovered in the darkness, only showcases are informed by diodes, but too weak lighting will be reviewed. A magnificent "wall of the skeletons" behind the glass facade presents 75 specimens in live scenes: a skeleton rider mounts of a horse, a lioness attacked an oryx and long skeleton of a whale stranded in 1865 at Algiers plunges into the sea. "It took more than five years to back the skeletons in the dynamic position!", said proudly one of the 45 cultural mediators to guide the public.

The visit is organized in 5 sequences. It begins with the Earth, volcanoes, and the drift of continents shown on the big screen. The following sequence deals with biodiversity. A tree of phylogenetic life traces the links between human beings live. The following collections of butterflies, crustacean, fish and mammals, under a giant squid from 16 metres in resin suspended from the ceiling.

"The stairs of time" leads the visitor on the upper floor, 3.2 billion years back, to the first proteins. First the top room evokes the continuum and failures in the history of the living, geological time viruses, with this quote from Charles Darwin in 1859: "the species that survive are not the highest, or intelligent, but those that adapt best to the change."The following sequence shows the five major functions of the living: move, communicate, reproduce, feed and protect themselves. Last room educates visitors to the protection of the environment, by drawing up an alarming dashboard of the planet on deforestation or fisheries resources.

The Museum, which employs no less than 130 people, an important activity of conservation and research in connection with the University and devoted a series of lectures to Darwin for the 200thbirthday of his birth. It will open in December a plateau on the actions for the environment and a classroom of human ecology. In October 2010, he will present his first large temporary exhibition on prehistory, recalling that he was the first gallery of prehistory in the world at the end of the 19th century by the many sites discovered in the region.

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