Dinosaur museum

The green area and the large building with two wings to your right are part of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. This is best known for its museum collection of dinosaurs, more specifically iguanodons. The long yellow wing (designed by Emmanuel Cels in 1857) was once intended to be part of a Redemptorist monastery which was never completed. The aristocratic Leopold Quarter was a popular choice for new monasteries. The wing to the left was built by architect Emile Janlet for the world-famous iguanodon skeletons that were discovered by miners in Bernissart in 1878. The collection of the species Iguanodon bernissartensis contains some 30 complete skeletons, dating from 115 to 140 million years ago. It is the museum’s main crowd-puller. The museum rooms display only a fraction of the estimated 38 million insects, stones, shells, fossils and bones in the storage rooms: after Paris and London, this is the largest natural history collection in Europe.

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