Vienna’s museum of natural history works like a cabinet of worldly curiosities. Major renovations—its exhibition halls were only equipped with electrical lighting in the late 1990s—helped the revered institution shed much its former Old World patina. It now prides itself with a handsome gift shop and new cafe Nautilus.

But its glorious collection still remains the same: With some 20 million specimens and artifacts, the collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum is one of the oldest in the world. Still a little heavy on the stuffed wildlife and preserved reptiles, the museum has enacted a clear effort to modernize and child-pad its splendid building.

Collection highlights include the “Venus of Willendorf,” a tiny statue of a rather voluptuous female figure dating from circa 24,000 B.C. discovered by archeologists in the Lower Austrian town of Willendorf in 1908, the giant skeleton of a Diplodocus—the longest terrestrial vertebrate that ever lived—and a giant 258 pound topaz in the museum’s famed collection of minerals. Kids will go wild over the live insects and spiders on show in the downstairs vivarium (the mothers, perhaps not so much).