Geological Museum of the State Geological Institute
The Geological Museum of the State Geological Institute is a museum in Warsaw, Poland. The museum was established in 1919.
History
On April 3, 1919, members of the Galician Parliament headed by Wincenty Witos appealed to the Sejm of the Republic of Poland to establish the Polish Institute of Geology, which began operating on May 7, 1919. The first director of the Institute was Józef Morozewicz, the professor of the Jagiellonian University - who emphasized that the Institute must have: "A museum that would house a possibly complete collection of fossil specimens found on Polish soil, and that would store originals and material evidence of scientific dissertations, by PGI in print published".The first chief curator of the museum was Jan Czarnocki, who created the museum collection. The main collection of the museum consisted of collections collected by geologists, as well as exhibits donated from the Museum of Industry and Agriculture and the Warsaw University of Technology.
The main building of the Geology Institute where the museum is located was partially commissioned in 1930. It was then that the final move from the Staszic Palace took place. In the new building, the entire first floor of the main pavilion, including three rooms with a total area of 1500 m2 and 20 cellars in the basement, has been dedicated to the Geological Museum. This arrangement was based on the architectural assumptions of the Institute of Mining in St. Petersburg and the British Geological Museum in London, where the exhibition was placed in the main halls, and around them were arranged rooms for exhibitions and studios.
In 1939, almost 200 collections were registered in the Book of Acquisitions, which translated into several hundred thousand items. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, a large part of the museum was burned, and it was possible to save 30% of the specimens. In 1945, under the leadership of Roman Kozłowski, the reconstruction of the Institute and museum collections began. In the 1950s, the museum was decorated with a specimen of salt from the Wieliczka Crystal Caves, a petrified trunk of a Carboniferous gymnosperm tree and skeletons of Pleistocene mammals. The mammoth skeleton exhibited at the PGI museum was assembled in the summer of 1957 from bone materials from the Pyskowice site by prof. dr. Zbigniew Ryziewicz and dr. Teresa Czyżewska from the University of Wrocław.
In the 1950s, two permanent exhibitions were launched under the leadership of Dr. Maria Żelichowska: Mineral resources of Poland - on the ground floor and Stratigraphy of Poland - on the first floor. Most of the specimens were placed in desktop display cases, above which there were tables with text and graphic information. In 1970, the museum was enriched with two new exhibitions: petrographic and mineralogical. These exhibitions contained approximately 300 minerals and rocks. On the 90th anniversary of the existence of the Polish Geological Institute, a commemorative plaque dedicated to Paweł Edmund Strzelecki was unveiled, and the main exhibition hall was named after him.
Exhibitions
The museum has been divided into eight thematic exhibitions: Material of the Earth, Polish building Stone, Mineral Resources of Poland, Fossilized World, Magmatism, Sedimentation and Diagenesis, Metamorphism, Geological History of Poland 1919-1999.Material of the Earth
The "Material of the Earth" exhibition presents almost 550 minerals and rocks from around the world that make up the lithosphere. Based on their chemical composition, the various classes of minerals as native elements, sulfides, halides, oxides and hydroxides, carbonates, sulfates, borates and phosphates, silicates and quartz group are discussed.The second part of the exhibition presents the variety of rocks. The basis for their classification is the genesis, mineral composition as well as structure and texture.