This Thursday, 15 February, the Natural History Museum of the Universitat de València (MUVHN) will celebrate its sixth anniversary. As previous years, on this day, the university collections will be shared with the public through guided tours at 11:00 and 12:00, remaining open to the public from 10:00 to 15:00. Moreover, some of the tasks performed by museum personnel, such as digitalisation of specimens and printing of 3D models, will be shown in a laboratory especially designed for this task.
The museum, located at the centre of the Burjassot-Paterna Campus of the Universitat de València, was inaugurated in 2018. Since then, the number of visitors; students of Master's Degrees and Undergraduate Degrees on internships; collaborations and participation in temporary exhibitions with important zoological, palaeontological, and geological collections; visits from researchers; agreements with a variety of entities; and donations of scientific collections of diverse nature have increased.
The museum offers two exhibition rooms. The zoological room offers an extensive collection of birds and terrestrial and marine mammals, representatives of local and exotic fauna. In the palaeontology and geology room, a collection of minerals, rocks sorted by their formation process, and a palaeontological collection depicting the history of life on Earth, spanning from its start to current times. Lastly, it offers a collection of skulls showing the evolution of our lineage.
A lot of the specimens exhibited are considered historical, coming from the original collections of the former Office of Natural History of the Universitat de València, which, given its history and antiquity, show the legacy of more than 200 years in some instances.
