Egyptian Geological Museum is located in El-Maadi. The museum is considered the first of it’s kind in the Middle East and Africa. It established in 1901 and opened to the public on 1 December 1904.
Egyptians were the pioneers in extraction and utilization of metals and stones. They were the first to discover gold and copper and mine them in the Eastern Desert and Sinai.
The museum displays different samples of rocks, minerals and fossils over 100 years old.
It is housing in a Greco-Roman style building and it was designed by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, who designed and constructed the Egyptian Museum.
“Fossils”
The original museum was expanded in 1968 with the construction of an annex designed to house the museum’s laboratories for petrology and paleontology. The museum remained in downtown Cairo until 1982, when the original building was torn down to accommodate construction of the Cairo Metro.
It includes a series of fossils unearthed in 1898 in Fayoum desert, examples of the natural history of Egypt, and how its geology and minerals helped make Egypt a world power.
The museum contains “Nakhalite Meteorite” that fell at El- Nakhla El- Baharia village in 1911,is one of a very few meteorites known to have their origin in the planet “Mars”.
It organizes weekly public meetings to discuss the cultural and scientific interest of specific exhibitions.
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.
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