[1][2] The NHM Vienna is one of the largest museums and non-university research institutions in Austria and an important center of excellence for all matters relating to natural sciences.

It was the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, Maria Theresa’s husband, who in 1750 purchased what was at the time the world's largest collection of natural history objects from the Florentine scholar and scientist Jean de Baillou.

Baillou's collection comprised 30,000 objects, including rare fossils, snails, mussels, and corals, as well as valuable minerals and precious stones.

Jacquin returned from this expedition with many live animals and plants for the zoo and the botanical garden, as well as 67 cases full of other items of interest from the natural world.

Under the leadership of Ignaz von Born the cabinet of natural history quickly developed into a center of practical research.

[5] To mark the marriage of his daughter Leopoldine to the heir to the Portuguese throne, Dom Pedro, Emperor Francis II sponsored a scientific expedition to her new home country of Brazil in 1817.

The expedition lasted 18 years and aimed to collect all plants, animals, and minerals of scientific interest and bring them back to Vienna.

Despite many sacrifices and great danger, the scientists returned to Vienna with both their invaluable travel journals and observations of the landscape, as well as a number of natural history items of interest welded into metal cases.

The petrologist and meteorite specialist Aristides Brezina became director of the former and was supported by scientific colleagues: Friedrich Berwerth, with Felix Karrer and Rudolf Koechlin providing voluntary unpaid services.

In 1889, the museum purchased the collection of William Earl Hidden from Newark, New Jersey (USA) for a sum of ƒ15,000 with the aid of an advance from the "All-highest Family Fund" of the Imperial Household.

This loan had to be repaid in a series of complicated transactions, effected within a timeframe of ten years (i.e. through the sale of mineral doublets, meteorite sections, and precious-metal redemptions).

Instead, the glass imitations of precious stones and some other mineralogical items were entrusted to the Imperial Natural History Court Museum.

Voluntary, unpaid assistance, from 1896 to the end of the monarchy was provided by Felix Karrer, alternately by Anton Pelinka, Hermann Graber, Friedrich Wachter and Karl Hlawatsch.

In one last transaction before the collapse of the monarchy, the museum managed to purchase, during the years 1906–1907, the magnificent collection of Staatsrath Freiherr von Braun (totalling more than 2,500 items, doublets not included).

He was one of the sponsors of mineralogy, and donated the large specimen of amethyst sample from the Serra do Mar in Brazil, weighing about 450 kilograms (990 lb).

Particularly valuable are the more than 500 meteorite thin sections, formerly owned by Aristides Brezina, custodian and former director, which Weinberger had purchased and later presented to the Museum.

The roof is crowned with a 65 m dome bearing a huge bronze statue of the Greek sun god Helios, a symbol of the life-giving element without which nature would not exist.

The upper and middle levels (mezzanine and first floor) of the intricately decorated facade display allegorical and mythological figures representing key elements of the universe and its discovery and understanding by man.

These fundamental ideas are also the basis for the sculptures and paintings in the Dome Hall and the grand staircase; the highlight here is Hans Canon's ceiling fresco, The Circle of Life.

The exhibits themselves are displayed in a systematic order according to how closely they are related to each other or their chronological position in the history of Planet Earth or human beings.

Nevertheless, mankind stands in the center of these events: a man, wrapped in a red cloth, holds an hourglass (presumably an allusion to Chronos, the god of time).

The order of the halls is based on the classification values of the 19th century: humans as the "apex of creation" were originally presented in a large part of the mezzanine with anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory.

This interplay between decoration and display objects gives the Natural History Museum Vienna is a unique artistic presentation.