Hasanbey Zardabi Natural History Museum

About

The Hasanbey Zardabi Natural History Museum (Azerbaijani: Həsən bəy Zərdabi adına Təbiət Tarixi Muzeyi) is a natural history museum in Baku, Azerbaijan. The museum bears the name of Hasan bey Zardabi, an Azerbaijani journalist and intellectual, and founder of the first Azeri-language newspaper Akinchi ("The Ploughman") in 1875. The museum has two departments: a geology department that has samples of metallic and nonmetallic natural resources and minerals and rocks of Azerbaijan and a zoology department. The general collection of the museum numbers more than 1400 different items. The biological department exhibits numerous skeletons and fragments of animal bones found during field work and treated by researchers. The oldest exhibit is the teeth of an ichthyosaur from the Cretaceous period, more than 120 million years old. The research activities of the Natural History Museum have developed in several directions, focused especially on paleontological sites. The main research focuses on the study of the Binagadi quaternary and the Eldar late Sarmatian hipparion faunas, Pirekishkuli Maykop vertebrate fauna, numerous sites of primitive people, as well as Azokh cave and others. In the collection of the quaternary fauna of Binagadi, there are 41 species of mammals, 110 species of birds, 2 reptiles, 1 amphibian, 107 insects and 22 species of plants. Among those are near-complete fossil

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