Senckenberg Nature Museum

This guide to the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt begins with a rotting seal left to decompose in a market stall at Frankfurt's 1817 trade fair, and the disgust that drove a group of local naturalists to act. Thirty-two of them pooled their own money that November to found a society for preserving nature without a single paying customer, naming it for a Frankfurt doctor who had left his medical fortune to the city's charities.