TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY Laurent Thomet.A picture taken on July 28, 2011 shows stuffed rhinoceros at the Brussels Royal Institute for Natural Sciences Museum. It was a daring daytime robbery at the natural science museum. The two thieves snuck into the rhino gallery and ripped a stuffed head off the wall. They carried it to a restroom, opened a window, and dropped the 30-kilo trophy two-stories down to an accomplice waiting in a van. The museum had never been robbed until the July heist, when it became the latest of a rising number of science museums in Europe targetted by thieves for rhino horns, which can fetch tens of thousands of euros on the black market.  AFP PHOTO / GEORGES GOBET (Photo credit should read GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images)

AFP/Getty Images

Institut des Sciences Naturelles

Top choice in Brussels


Thought-provoking and highly interactive, this museum has far more than the usual selection of stuffed animals. But the undoubted highlight is a unique ‘family’ of iguanodons – 10m-high dinosaurs found in a Hainaut coal mine in 1878. A computer simulation shows the mudslide that might have covered them, sand-boxes allow you to play dino hunter and multilingual videos give a wonderfully nuanced debate on recent palaeontology.

The bus here departs from next to Gare Centrale in the direction of Homborch, stopping at De Meeus on Rue du Luxembourg.