The Mini Museum is a desktop display case that holds some of the most interesting specimen artifacts in the world. And you can have it sitting right on your desk.
Created by Hans Fex, it’s a portable collection that contains small chunks of rare artifacts, duly cataloged and labeled for your daily perusal. These aren’t fake replicas, either — instead, they’re supposed to be real deal authentic curiosities, containing bits of legit items that he has procured over the years.
Three sizes of Mini Museums are available: small (contains 11 specimens), medium (contains 22) and large (contains 33). The fragments encased in the panel come from a variety of equally interesting sources, namely:
- a 4.5 billion year old meteorite
- lunar rock
- Martian rock
- a Chelyabinsk meteorite
- a meteorite that allegedly killed a cow
- a 3.4 billion year old fossil
- a 55 million year old palm tree from Antarctica
- a dinosaur egg shell
- the vertebrae of a sauropod
- a bone from a hadrosaur
- a horn from a triceratops
- a tooth from a T-Rex
- a 40-million year old insect fossilized in amber
- a pterosaur’s wing bone
- a K-Pg Boundary Layer sample
- mammoth hair
- Egyptian mummy wrap
- the 19th century London Bridge
- the Berlin Wall
- a raw gold nugget
- a foundation brick from Abe Lincoln’s house
- Corinthian leather (yeah, we don’t know what this is doing here, either)
- 50s-era sand from Waikiki
- soil from Vlad III’s castle
- the surviving fir tree during the Tunguska event
- coal from the Titanic
- trinitite from the first nuclear bomb test
- a rock from Mt. Everest
- a ladder rung from Mt. Everest
- foil from the Apolo 11 Command Module
- a human skull
- a human brain
- and one mystery specimen
Whew. Yeah, that’s a heck of a lot of awesomeness right there. Each Mini Museum is handcrafted in a transparent resin case, making for a beautiful decorative piece that looks great whether on your workdesk or the living room shelf. The catch? None of the items appear to be authenticated, so they could very well have come from Hans’ mama’s backyard. Or something like that. Seems legit, though. Plus, at $239 for the large display panel, it’s quite a gorgeous piece for the price. You can reserve yourself a unit from the official Kickstarter campaign.