Hear echoes of the sea in landlocked Budapest

Located on the plains of Central Europe, Hungary has no coastline. Starting from its capital Budapest, you need to travel more than 500 kilometers, cross into neighboring Croatia and wind through mountains until you reach the nearest stretch of the Adriatic Sea.

Yet if you step into the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, the sea is remarkably close. Beneath the soaring roof of the museum's entrance hall, even before the ticket counter, hangs the skeleton of a fin whale more than 20 meters long and weighing over 2 metric tons.

The whale was caught in the Atlantic in 1896 and its skeleton, first displayed in Vienna, eventually found its way to Hungary. Over the more than 100 years that followed, it survived a fire caused by an artillery shell explosion in 1956, and was moved into the museum's present building in 2004. The architectural design had to factor in the whale, with the ceiling designed asymmetrically to make room for the giant skeleton.

By placing such a legendary specimen at its entrance, the museum implies to all visitors its longing for the sea and offers clues leading to more ocean-related collections inside.

Ocean discovery

When you walk farther inside, another marine world appears — this time beneath your feet.

A 122-square-meter glass floor covers a reconstruction of a coral reef, with fish exhibits lying about 60 centimeters below visitors. Just look down through the glass, and it feels like walking over a shallow tropical sea.

The display recreates several different reef environments, from fringing and patch reefs to barrier reefs and deeper waters. Around it, aquariums built into the walls contain live fish and corals, which hold about 13,000 liters of water together, or roughly the volume of 70 bathtubs.

According to information displayed at the museum, this permanent exhibition contains more than 200 coral species, around 160 fish species and over 1,000 specimens and living examples of mollusks, crustaceans, worms, sea urchins, starfish and other creatures.

Above the coral exhibition is a playful gallery constructed in the shape of Noah's Ark, where a furry giraffe pokes its head through a window high above visitors. Monkeys, ostriches and tigers also appear among the animals supposedly sheltering aboard the vessel.

But this Hungarian version of the ark has apparently made room for sea creatures as well: inside its cabin there are shelves displaying shells, conchs and other marine creatures.

Hungarians, it seems, have a way of keeping the sea close. That fascination is also embodied in some displayed items that come from the distant past. On the other side, opposite the ark is another exhibition, "Lost Worlds — The Age of Dinosaurs in Hungary", which displays a collection of fossils discovered in the country.

Among the most memorable fossils on display is that of a marine crocodile that lived about 180 million years ago. Only part of the prehistoric animal survives, principally sections of its vertebral column and ribs. But the museum has reconstructed the creature around those remains, presenting a predator roughly 5 meters long in a hunting pose.

Its body immediately reveals that this was no ordinary crocodile. Its small limbs, long paddle-like tail and extremely sharp teeth all tell audiences it was an animal adapted for life in the sea.

The label beside the ocean crocodile reads:

Place: Hungary.

Age: 180 million years.

In other words, today's landlocked Hungary was once covered by the sea.

To understand how a marine predator could end up fossilized in the middle of a landlocked European country, you need to board a time machine and travel back about 180 million years.

The map of the world then is quite different from today's. The supercontinent, Pangaea, had begun breaking apart. Between its great northern and southern landmasses stretched an enormous body of water known as the Tethys Ocean.

The region that would eventually become Hungary was a small corner of this changing tropical and subtropical world, where islands, shallow marine platforms and deeper basins existed side by side.

Conifers, cycads and ferns grew on the islands. Ammonites and fish filled the surrounding waters. Marine reptiles occupied ecological niches that would one day belong to different animals, but at that time they were indisputably the rulers.

The marine crocodile displayed in Budapest was among the large predators inhabiting the region's shallow waters, while the world farther offshore in the Tethys Ocean was ruled by even larger beasts. Ichthyosaurs approaching 10 meters in length occupied the upper levels of the food chain, while long-necked plesiosaurs and large marine crocodiles moved between islands, shallow seas and deeper basins.

It was a world that lasted for tens of millions of years, but still lost its standing to time. As the Tethys gradually contracted, sediments on its floor were compressed, folded and lifted, leading different blocks of crust to migrate and join together. By about 85 million years ago, parts of what is now western Hungary had become relatively stable land crossed by rivers and floodplains.

Dinosaur succession

The marine crocodiles were gone together with the shallow marine waters, their place taken by another group of giants — Hungarosaurus tormai, the first dinosaur to be scientifically described from fossils found in present-day Hungary, a species named after the country itself.

The dinosaur was discovered at a former bauxite mine in Iharkut, western Hungary. Hungarian paleontologist Attila Osi and fossil hunter Andras Torma found the site in 2000, and subsequent excavations uncovered remarkably complete remains of the armored dinosaur. Osi formally described it as a new species in 2005, naming it after the nation Hungary and the scientist Torma.

About 4 meters long, Hungarosaurus tormai was hardly a giant by dinosaur standards, but plates of bone covered its body from neck to tail, giving the compact herbivore lots of protection from neighboring carnivores.

Hungarosaurus lived around 84 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, and is particularly significant because its remains were among the first dinosaur body fossils discovered in Hungary.

The herbivore and the marine crocodile now share the same exhibition hall, less than 10 meters from each other. However, they would never have encountered each other in life, as they are separated by roughly 100 million years.

In fact, the span of time between the marine crocodile and Hungarosaurus is comparable to the immense gulf separating Hungarosaurus from humans — about 80 million years, long enough for seas to become mountains, seabeds to become plains, and past rulers of the world to die out and turn into fossils.

Perhaps 80 million years from now — or perhaps much sooner — we humans, too, will have vanished from this world, leaving behind only fossils to be displayed alongside crocodiles and dinosaurs for future visitors.

Just imagine what kind of life would visit that museum.