The Choceň Museum was founded by local patriots and amateur collectors of natural history at the beginning of the 20th century. An important figure associated with the founding of the museum was the famous Czech palaeontologist Antonín Frič. The museum has several permanent exhibitions and became famous for the discovery of the oldest pterosaur in the Czech Republic, the copy of whose fossil can be seen here.

The beginnings of the Orlice Museum in Choceň are associated with a local teacher, Karel Prudič (1874-1933), who decided to gather interesting exhibits and materials from Choceň together with other local patriots and found their own museum. Prudič`s old friend from university, the famous palaeontologist Antonín Frič, helped them to establish the museum and convinced the Choceň municipality to found it. Moreover, Antonín Frič owed a lot to the amateur researchers from Choceň, because it was the founders of the local museum - especially the pharmacist Antonín Hlaváč - who found the rare fossilized remains of a pterosaur called Cretornis in the nearby Zářecká Lhota in 1880 for his collections and scientific analysis. This find even became the most important and the earliest palaeontological find of a pterosaur in our country and it was Antonín Frič who described it for world science and had the original fossil deposited in the National Museum in Prague.

The museum has acquired the meeting room of the Choceň Town Hall. However, it soon proved to be too small, but it was not until the Second World War that larger premises could be obtained. After the war, the new museum management obtained the premises of the Choceň Chateau, where the museum is still located to this day. Today the museum has several permanent exhibitions. In addition to the brickmaking exhibition and the historical exhibition, which contains, among other things, rare collections of old Bible prints, the museum also focuses on the original paleontological and geological collection. In addition to the already mentioned fossil of a pterosaur, or its copy, there are also skeletal remains of animals that lived in the area of Choceň in the Quaternary period. In the museum you can see the molar and tusk of a mammoth, the skull of a cave bear or the bones of a woolly rhinoceros. The geological collection contains mainly Mesozoic fossils of cephalopods and fish.

Connected places: Discovery of the pterosaur near Zářecká LhotaObjev ptakoještěra u Zářecké Lhoty

Keywords: geology; paleontology; museum; mineralogy; petrology; geology; fossil