GeoMuseum

The GeoMuseum occupies the rooms of the university's former Mineralogical Museum. After the museum of the Geological-Paleontological Institute had to make way for the newly founded GeoLibrary, the most important geological exhibits were combined with the minerals and crystals, and the exhibition was reopened in 2000 under the name GeoMuseum.

The museum's predecessor can be considered a mineralogical-geological collection created in the 1920s and exhibited from 1938 onwards in the Geological-Mineralogical Institute in the “Rundbau,” a fortress building at the Südbahnhof. In addition, there was the Museum of Natural History of the City of Cologne, which was housed in the Severinstorburg from 1881 to 1902 and in the Stapelhaus from 1902 to 1945.

Both collections were largely destroyed by bombing between 1942 and 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, new mineralogical and geological-paleontological collections were built up around the rescued remains of the collection in the provisionally refurbished “Rundbau” through purchases, exchanges, and finds from excursions. In 1962, the Mineralogical Institute also received the minerals and rocks from the Museum of Natural History that had been rescued from the destroyed Stapelhaus on loan from the City of Cologne; the Geological Institute received some of the fossils.

In 1967, the museum rooms described above were set up in the newly constructed Institute buildings for Geology and Mineralogy on Zülpicher Strasse.