is the topic of the last exhibition room in the permanent exhibition. It is an exhibition about the Ice Age, geological landscapes, erratic boulders, fossils of extinct large mammals and specimens of animal species from the tundra and taiga that survived the Ice Age.
The exhibition provides information about the changes to our landscape and its flora and fauna during the various glacial advances of the Pleistocene ice ages. Between the cold periods, there were also warm epochs, during which warm-period animals such as the forest elephant or water buffalo migrated. In the anteroom, the most recent stage of the earth’s history, the Holocene, is examined and the climate and vegetation changes that have taken place in our region over the last 10,000 years are discussed.
Numerous bone finds from former and still active gravel pits in Magdeburg are shown for the first time in this extensive fossil exhibition. The complete skeleton of a giant deer can be seen in the centre. With its 4-metre-wide antlers, the giant deer literally towers over the heads of the visitors and gives the exhibition a special authenticity.
Life-size silhouettes of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other large mammals are mounted on particularly well-preserved skulls, bones and tusks, so that one can better imagine the size of these prehistoric animals. But the exhibition doesn’t just show extinct life. Large specimens of “survivors” of the Ice Age, such as musk ox, bison and Przewalski’s horse, give visitors of all ages an impression of the former megafauna of the Ice Age.
