A new shelf life for treasures of nature

Berlin museum bombed during the war is finally reborn, reports Tony Paterson

They might have been lifted from the most ghoulish of horror films: more than 200,000 jars containing more than a million snakes, monster frogs, bats, stunted fish, outlandish lizards and serpents, all garishly illuminated on nearly eight miles of theatrically back-lit shelving.

The spectacular display, which uses some 21,600 gallons of alcohol, is the world's biggest, most sophisticated collection of so-called "wet species", comprised of rare reptile specimens collected across the globe in the past 200 years. Visitors to Berlin's natural history museum are able to pass through an elaborately constructed climatised air lock at the 200-year-old research institute and enter a vast darkened chamber where the alcohol-preserved reptiles have gone on permanent public display to the public for the first time.

Yet inside the magical "wet" collection room, it was crowds of delighted rather than frightened children that were pressing their noses against huge illuminated glass walls that seemed to be stuffed with creatures taken straight from Alice in Wonderland.

"In museum terms, this is like a Phoenix rising from the ashes," said Andreas Kunkel, a spokesman for the museum, which was inspired by the research conducted by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt two centuries ago. "After a break lasting all of 65 years, we are back in business," he said. The exhibition is the high point of what amounts to the rebirth of Berlin's once-legendary natural history museum. It is now aiming to resume its place among the world's foremost after undergoing a comprehensive €30m (£25m) restoration programme.

Its collection includes the world's largest dinosaur skeleton, 25 million mammals, fish and insects, and birds, now extinct, collected during Captain Cook's voyages, and the institution once rated alongside its counterparts in London and Paris in terms of global scientific importance. It was formally opened by the last Imperial Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in 1889 and was designed to put German natural science firmly on the map.

However in 1945, an Allied air raid reduced the east wing of the turn-of-the-century building in Berlin's Invalidenstrasse to a blackened ruin. During the Cold War, the museum was deprived of cash as it was located in the communist-run sector of Berlin, firmly ensconced behind the city's infamous Wall. "The museum was left badly neglected," Mr Kunkel said. "Almost nothing was done to it for over six decades."

As little as eight years ago, trees were growing out of sections of the bomb-damaged building. Its priceless collections of stuffed birds and mammals were so badly affected by the lack of a modern climate-control system that the skin and feathers were drying up, splitting and falling off the exhibits. "It is not nice for the visitors," complained the museum's director at the time.

Chronic underfunding meant that staff were unable to open, let alone catalogue, the museum's 250 tons of prehistoric skeletal specimens that were brought back to Berlin from the largest single dinosaur excavation on record, which took place in 1913 in German East Africa. In winter, museum researchers had to wear thick coats if they wanted to examine specimens. Heating was banned because it meant the alcohol containing the reptiles would evaporate too quickly.

The museum's plight prompted natural history professors from Britain, the United States, France, Switzerland and Denmark to publicise an appeal in 2002 for the equivalent of an initial £6.4m to help to rescue the building.

They pointed out its collections were "part of a national and international cultural heritage" and concluded that the museum was "dangerously underfunded". However, the suggestion that the Berlin museum should bid for sponsorship – as its London counterpart did for its popular Darwin Centre – was not taken up. Instead, the museum became mired in bureaucratic wrangling between Germany's federal government and the then government of the bankrupt capital, Berlin, which faced £31bn worth of debts.

Yet salvation arrived last year, when the museum was finally classified as one of the country's acclaimed Leibniz scientific research institutes, funded jointly by regional and central government.

The new money has allowed the purchase of sonar-type equipment which enables researchers to examine the contents of hundreds of bamboo crates packed with dinosaur bones that have remained unopened since they were brought by ship nearly a century ago.

Specimens such as a finely penned 16th-century specimen log book and a sea-foam-coloured antique cabinet full of rare corals have been restored. And items with a darker history, such as a doe-eyed panda that Hermann Göring, the Nazi air chief, ordered stuffed for Berlin's 1935 "hunting exhibition", are also on display. Even the remains of a stuffed Vasa parrot called Jacob – the favourite pet of Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of modern geography – are there.