Housed in the Florentine style building of the Palais de Rumine, the treasures of the Geology Museum take its visitors to another world, with a 16,000 year-old mammoth skeleton, one of the most complete ever found in Europe and an enormous molar discovered in 1897 which apparently belonged to a prehistoric hippopotamus who lived in Sicily 1.8 million years ago.
Here too, mineralogy enthusiasts can discover the amazing collection of a thousand minerals created by Czar Alexander 1st and brought to Switzerland by his tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe. But the main attraction is The Welcome Nugget, the biggest gold nugget ever recorded at 57.3 kilos. Truth be told, this is the single replica of this nugget since the Australian original was melted in London in 1859…
