The origin of the oldest museum of the capital city dates back to the Magdeburg Society of Natural Science which was founded in 1869. For a start, collections were shown to the public in the premises of the Realgymnasium (high school) in Brandenburger Strasse in 1875. The society's museum of natural science moved to the building at Cathedral Square 5 in 1893 and was taken over by the municipal authorities in 1905. By 1906, the building with all its halls and rooms was occupied by the museum. The museum suffered extensive damage during the Second World War, it was destroyed in 1945 and suffered the loss of many of its valuable exhibits which had been stored in other places for safe keeping. However, it found a new home in the former Emperor Frederick Museum at Otto-von-Guericke-Strasse. In the meantime the museum has acquired more than 25 000 exhibits in the areas of geology, mineralogy, palaeontology as well as botany and zoology. Special emphasis is put on collecting exhibits form the Land of Saxony-Anhalt. Occasionally, objects from other climatic zones are acquired provided that they had an important influence on our region during the historic development of the earth.

Photography: A complete skeleton of a male giant deer also known as the Irish elk or Megaloceros giganteus (Blumenbach 1803), found in Ireland and dating back to the end of the last Ice Age about 9000 years ago.

On the occasion of Magdeburg's 1200th anniversary in 2005, the dedicated museum staff also organised a natural science exhibition “Aspects of Urban Ecology - Magdeburg from the Middle Ages to Modern Times.”

Permanent exhibitions: