Slovenian Museum of Natural History

The museum was founded in 1821 as the Carniolan Estates Museum (). Five years later, Austrian Emperor Francis II decided to personally sponsor the museum and ordered it renamed the Carniolan Provincial Museum. In 1882, the museum was renamed the Carniolan Provincial Museum—Rudolphinum after Crown Prince Rudolph. After the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the name was changed to the National Museum. In 1944, it was divided into the National Museum of Slovenia and the Slovenian Museum of Natural History (then known as the Museum of Natural Sciences). In 2005, the museum acquired its largest object, a skeleton of a young female fin whale named Leonora, which was found dead on the Slovenian coast in 2003. The animal weighed and was long. After an elaborate procedure, the skeleton was put on display in autumn 2011. ==Collections==

The museum's geological-palaeontological collections include fossils from various Slovenian sites. In addition to the mammoth from Nevlje, also of significance are a 210-million-year-old long fish skeleton found in the Triglav Mountains and a Miocene-era baleen whale skeleton found in the Slovene Hills. One of the museum's founding collections was Sigmund Zois's mineral collection. Although it is an outstanding historical collection, minerals are now exhibited as classified by modern methods according to their internal structure, and among them is the mineral zoisite, named after Zois. There are also two Biedermeier wooden tables that are covered by tiles from Palnstorf's collection of minerals and rocks. Hohenwart's collection of mollusc shells comprises about 5,000 specimens, dating from 1831 and originating mainly from the Indo-Pacific. The insect collection of Ferdinand J. Schmidt includes several interesting specimens, notably the "narrow-necked" blind cave beetles (Leptodirus hochenwartii) that were described in 1831 as the first cave insect. The plants and animals of the mountains, marshes, and woods are shown in specialised dioramas. Also on view are permanent bird, reptile, fish, mammal and skeleton collections. The Slovenian Wildlife Sound Archive is a collection of animal sounds, mainly on Heteroptera and cicadas, stored on digital and analogue recording media. == References ==