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Teylers Museum is a natural history museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and the oldest public museum in the country. The museum hosts a collection of fossils, minerals, historical scientific instruments and works of art.
The most remarkable item in the collection may be the "Haarlem specimen" (or "Teylers specimen") of Archaeopteryx, the so-called "first bird". Discovered in a quarry near Richstatt, Germany in 1855, it was the very first specimen discovered, though it was misidentified as Pterodactylus crassipes until the American paleontologist John Ostrom recognized its true nature in 1970. The specimen is composed of parts of the hindlimbs, and a hand with a poor impression of feathers, contained in two slabs of Solnhofen limestone.
The museum was founded with money from the legacy of Pieter Teyler van der Hulst (1702–1778), a rich citizen of Haarlem. The museum was designed by architect Leendert Viervant (1752–1801) in 1779. It was built next to the building of Teyler van der Hulst, and extended with a large oval room. In the 19th century the building was expanded with a new front looking at the river Spaarne.
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