The Museonder is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 museum in the De Hoge Veluwe

Hoge Veluwe National Park

Nationaal Park De Hoge Veluwe is a Dutch national park in the province of Gelderland near the cities of Ede, Arnhem and Apeldoorn. It is approximately 55 square kilometers in area, consisting of heathlands, sand dunes, and woodlands. It is situated in the Veluwe, the area of the largest terminal...

 National Park

National park

A national park is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns. Although individual nations designate their own national parks differently A national park is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or...

 The museum focuses on the geology

Geology

Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

 and biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 of the Veluwe

Veluwe

The Veluwe is a forest-rich ridge of hills in the province of Gelderland in the Netherlands. The Veluwe features many different landscapes including woodland, heath, some small lakes and Europe's largest sand drifts....

 and calls itself the world's first fully underground museum. The name "Museonder" is a portmanteau of the Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

 words for "museum" and "under", respectively "museum" and "onder".

History

The museum was opend in March 1993 by Prince Claus of the Netherlands. It was immediately praised for its modern approach to presenting information. Within six months it was reported that the number of visitors to the national park had risen by nearly half, largely due to the new museum. It was also made public that the museum suffered from vandalism

Vandalism

Vandalism is the behaviour attributed originally to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...

 and needed to hire more guards and to repair parts of the exhibition.

In 2008, the directorate of the national park announced renovations to the park, including the Museonder. The museum would host changing exhibitions, in addition to the permanent presentation.

Collection

The museum collection includes skeletal

Skeleton

The skeleton is the body part that forms the supporting structure of an organism. There are two different skeletal types: the exoskeleton, which is the stable outer shell of an organism, and the endoskeleton, which forms the support structure inside the body.In a figurative sense, skeleton can...

 remains of extant and extinct

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point...

 species that live and lived in the area. Examples of species on display are the woolly rhinoceros

Woolly Rhinoceros

The woolly rhinoceros is an extinct species of rhinoceros that was common throughout Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene epoch and survived the last glacial period. The genus name Coelodonta means "cavity tooth"...

, the cave bear

Cave Bear

The cave bear was a species of bear that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene and became extinct at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum about 27,500 years ago....

, the straight-tusked elephant

Straight-tusked Elephant

The Straight-tusked Elephant is an extinct species of elephant closely related to the living Asian Elephant. It inhabited Europe during the Middle and Late Pleistocene . Some experts regard the smaller Asian species E...

 and the aurochs

Aurochs

The aurochs , the ancestor of domestic cattle, were a type of large wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but is now extinct; it survived in Europe until 1627....

. Other exhibited items are glacial erratic

Glacial erratic

A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from the Latin word errare, and are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres...

s and the carefully excavated root

Root

In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant that typically lies below the surface of the soil. This is not always the case, however, since a root can also be aerial or aerating . Furthermore, a stem normally occurring below ground is not exceptional either...

s of a 135-year-old tree

Tree

A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...

.