Opgeraapt Opgevist Uitgehakt

The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey through time, from 500 million year old tube sandstone from Drenthe, 70 million year old sharks and sea urchins from the Limburg Cretaceous to the relatively young skeleton parts of the woolly mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and beluga that were fished out of the North Sea. These and other magnificent fossils - top pieces from Dutch museum collections and private collections - provide a picture of our prehistory that can be seen so completely nowhere else.

The Netherlands is very rich in fossils, but few people know that. We don't have to go abroad to find traces from the distant past. The oldest fossils found in the Netherlands are more than half a billion years old! They are chunks of sandstone with crawling tracks, originating from the Hondsrug in Drenthe. Two such chunks can be seen in Rotterdam. Furthermore, corals and trilobites of more than 400 million years old are on display, there are fossil leaves, tree trunks, roots and insects from the Carboniferous from the Limburg coal mines, skeletal parts and footprints of reptiles from a quarry near Winterswijk (230 million years old) and magnificent sharks and sea urchins from the Limburg Cretaceous (70 million years ago). The highlight is an early 19th century cast of the Mosasaurus, the original fossil of which was taken from Maastricht to Paris by the French army in 1795.