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| Established | 1901 |
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| Location | Maadi  |
| Type | Geological museum |
| Website | Official website |
The Egyptian Geological Museum is a museum in Cairo, Egypt. The museum was established in 1901 as part of the Egyptian Geological Survey, which had been started in 1896 under the direction of the Khedive Ismail. The museum was the first of its kind in the Middle East and the African continent. [1] [2]
The museum was initially housed in a Greco-Roman style building that was located in the gardens of the Ministry of Public Works in downtown Cairo; it was designed by Marcel Dourgnon, the French architect who had previously designed and constructed the Egyptian Museum (also known as the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities). This building had an exhibition hall with ceilings 4 metres (13 ft) high in order to accommodate the reconstructed fossil skeletons of paleontological finds, which included a 3 metres (10 ft) high ancestral elephant. [1] The first Museum Keeper was William Andrews, a paleontologist from London's Natural History Museum, in 1904, who was followed by Henry Osborne in 1906. [3]
During World War II, most of the important samples were buried in the sand so they wouldn't be damage if the area was bombed. After the war, the samples were sent back to the Geological Museum to be put on display. [2]
The original museum was expanded in 1968 with the construction of an annex designed to house the museum's laboratories for petrology and paleontology. [1] The museum remained there in downtown Cairo until 1982, when the original building was torn down to accommodate construction of the Cairo Metro. [1]
The museum was transferred to its present location near Maadi, a southern suburb of Cairo.
On display are the Fayoum vertebrates, a series of fossils that had been unearthed in 1898 by geologist Hugh Beadnell at Qasr Al-Sagha to the north of Birqet Qarun in the Fayoum desert. [1] These artifacts were sent to the British Museum for identification and returned to be displayed at the museum. The museum also includes examples of the natural history of Egypt, and how its geology and minerals helped make Egypt a world power. [3]
Also in the museum's collection is the Nakhla meteorite, a Martian meteorite that fell at the village of El Nakhla El Baharia village in 1911, and is one of a very few meteorites known to have their origin in the planet Mars. [1]
One of the main museum exhibitions is the set of type specimens from the Kamil iron meteorite, a huge iron meteorite that fell 2000–5000 years ago (3-4) to strike the sandstone bedrocks of the Cretaceous period, 1000 km southwest of Cairo. The huge kinetic energy that resulted from the meteorite collision with the ground created a medium-sized crater, 45 meters in diameter and 15 meters deep, as a result of a pushing-off the sandstone country rocks at the point of the impact.
The meteorite itself exploded and disrupted into thousands of fragments, ranging in size from minute millimeter-sized grains up to several centimeters. Both the meteoritic fragments and the sandstone chunks are distributed around the crater in more or less regular arms that extend 1 km from the crater center.
The new Museum administration takes steps to develop the services of the museum. From January 2011 the museum staff began a monthly scientific report, each focused on one of the interesting museum exhibitions. Now there are comprehensive data on the Gebel Kamil meteorite, which represents one of the more interesting exhibitions in the museum, as well as Egyptian dinosaurs, and gemstones.
The museum organizes weekly public meetings to discuss the cultural and scientific interest of specific exhibitions.
During the latest government problems, while no visitor was allowed to enter the exhibition hall of the Museum, some objects of historical interest disappeared, including face of a Pharaonic statue made of basalt and a small Roman statue made of serpentine. This is mystery because there were no visitors to the museum at that time. This happened during the second month in office of the new director, who led immediately a comprehensive reform in the various sections of the museum. There were no troubles in the museum to account for this mystery. The Egyptian Military recovered all objects, except the small Roman statue.
The museum opens from 8.30 am to 5.00 pm every day including Fridays and national holidays. The museum may be contacted by phone at ++02 25240916.
A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from an object, such as a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid, that originates in outer space and survives its passage through the atmosphere to reach the surface of a planet or moon. When the original object enters the atmosphere, various factors such as friction, pressure, and chemical interactions with the atmospheric gases cause it to heat up and radiate energy. It then becomes a meteor and forms a fireball, also known as a shooting star; astronomers call the brightest examples "bolides". Once it settles on the larger body's surface, the meteor becomes a meteorite. Meteorites vary greatly in size. For geologists, a bolide is a meteorite large enough to create an impact crater.
Meteor Crater, or Barringer Crater, is a meteorite impact crater about 37 mi (60 km) east of Flagstaff and 18 mi (29 km) west of Winslow in the desert of northern Arizona, United States. The site had several earlier names, and fragments of the meteorite are officially called the Canyon Diablo Meteorite, after the adjacent Cañon Diablo. Because the United States Board on Geographic Names recognizes names of natural features derived from the nearest post office, the feature acquired the name of "Meteor Crater" from the nearby post office named Meteor.
A Martian meteorite is a rock that formed on Mars, was ejected from the planet by an impact event, and traversed interplanetary space before landing on Earth as a meteorite. As of September 2020, 277 meteorites had been classified as Martian, less than half a percent of the 72,000 meteorites that have been classified. The largest complete, uncut Martian meteorite, Taoudenni 002, was recovered in Mali in early 2021. It weighs 14.5 kilograms and is on display at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum.
The Wabar craters are impact craters located in Saudi Arabia first brought to the attention of Western scholars by British Arabist, explorer, writer and Colonial Office intelligence officer St John Philby, who discovered them while searching for the legendary city of Ubar in Arabia's Rub' al Khali in 1932.
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum or the Cairo Museum, in Cairo, Egypt, is home to an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities. It has 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display and the remainder in storerooms. Built in 1901 by the Italian construction company, Garozzo-Zaffarani, to a design by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, the edifice is one of the largest museums in the region. As of March 2019, the museum was open to the public. In 2022, the museum is due to be superseded by the newer and larger Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza.
The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, is the national natural history museum of France and a grand établissement of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is located in Paris, France, within the Jardin des Plantes on the left bank of the River Seine. It was formally founded in 1793 during the French Revolution, but was begun even earlier in 1635 as the royal garden of medicinal plants. The museum now has 14 sites throughout France.
The Rock Elm Disturbance is an impact crater in Pierce County, Wisconsin, United States, roughly 40 kilometres (25 mi) southwest of Menomonie. The disturbance is named for Rock Elm, Wisconsin, a nearby town.
Red Mountain is a long ridge running southwest-northeast and dividing Jones Valley from Shades Valley south of Birmingham, Alabama. It is part of the Ridge-and-Valley region of the Appalachian mountains. The Red Mountain Formation of hard Silurian rock strata lies exposed in several long crests, and was named "Red Mountain" because of the rust-stained rock faces and prominent seams of red hematite iron ore. The mountain was the site of the Sloss, Republic Steel, Woodward Iron and Tennessee Coal and iron mines which supplied ore to Birmingham's iron furnaces. The best displays of the mountain's geological strata occur at the Twentieth Street cut near the Vulcan statue and at the U.S. Route 31 highway cut leading into the suburb of Homewood. Most of Birmingham's television and radio stations have their transmission towers located on Red Mountain.
The Canyon Diablo meteorite refers to the many fragments of the asteroid that created Meteor Crater, Arizona, United States. Meteorites have been found around the crater rim, and are named for nearby Canyon Diablo, which lies about three to four miles west of the crater.
Libyan Desert glass or Great Sand Sea glass is an impactite, made mostly of lechatelierite, found in areas in the eastern Sahara, in the deserts of eastern Libya and western Egypt. Fragments of desert glass can be found over areas of tens of square kilometers.
Wādī al-Ḥītān is a paleontological site in the Faiyum Governorate of Egypt, some 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-west of Cairo. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2005 for its hundreds of fossils of some of the earliest forms of whale, the archaeoceti. The site reveals evidence for the explanation of one of the greatest mysteries of the evolution of whales: the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going mammal from a previous life as a land-based animal. No other place in the world yields the number, concentration and quality of such fossils, nor their accessibility and setting in an attractive and protected landscape. The valley was therefore inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005.
Kebira Crater is the name given to a circular topographic feature that was identified in 2007 by Farouk El-Baz and Eman Ghoneim using satellite imagery, Radarsat-1, and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data in the Sahara desert. This feature straddles the border between Egypt and Libya. The name of this feature is derived from the Arabic word for "large", and also from its location near the Gilf Kebir region in southwest Egypt. Based solely on their interpretations of the remote sensing data, they argue that this feature is an exceptionally large, double-ringed, extraterrestrial impact crater. They suggest that the crater's original appearance has been obscured by wind and water erosion over time. Finally, they speculated that this feature might be the source of the yellow-green silica glass fragments, known as "Libyan desert glass", that can be found across part of Egypt's Libyan Desert. They neither conducted any fieldwork at this feature nor studied any samples collected from it. However, the Kebira Crater is currently not listed in the Earth Impact Database. Field trips to investigate the feature have found no supporting evidence. The "central uplift" clearly retains the horizontal bedding of the surrounding sandstone tableland, providing clear evidence against a possible impact origin.
The UW–Madison Geology Museum (UWGM) is a geology and paleontology museum housed in Weeks Hall, in the southwest part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The museum's main undertakings are exhibits, outreach to the public, and research. It has the second highest attendance of any museum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, exceeded only by the Chazen Museum of Art. The museum charges no admission.
The Grand Egyptian Museum, also known as the Giza Museum, is an archaeological museum under construction in Giza, Egypt. It will house artifacts of ancient Egypt, including the complete Tutankhamun collection, and is set to be the largest archaeological museum in the world. Many pieces in its collection will be displayed for the first time. The museum is sited on a plot of land of about 480,000 square metres (5,200,000 sq ft) approximately 2 kilometres from the Giza pyramid complex and was built as part of a new master plan for the Giza Plateau called Giza 2030.
Nakhla is a Martian meteorite which fell in Egypt in 1911. It was the first meteorite reported from Egypt, the first one to suggest signs of aqueous processes on Mars, and the prototype for Nakhlite type of meteorites.
Egypt has many fossil-bearing geologic formations, in which many dinosaurs have been discovered.
The Kamil Crater is a 44.8 m (147 ft) wide and 15.8 m (52 ft) deep meteorite impact crater in the East Uweinat Desert in southwestern New Valley Governorate, Egypt, Only 0.6 km (0.4 mi) north of the border with the Sudan and 600 m (2,000 ft) above sea level. It was located in 2008 using Google Earth satellite imagery by Vincenzo de Michele.
The Sintra Natural History Museum is a museum of natural history located in the historic center of the village of Sintra. The museum has both at national and international level due to the quality and rarity of many of its exhibits.
Gebel Kamil is a meteorite that struck Egypt about 5000 years ago leaving a crater surrounded by thousands of pieces of iron shrapnel with a total weight of about 1,600 kilograms (3,500 lb).
The geology of Namibia encompasses rocks of Paleoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic to Cenozoic age. About 46% of the countryʼs surface are bedrock exposure, while the remainder is covered by the young overburden sediments of the Kalahari and Namib deserts.
