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Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The museum housed in a purpose-built Victorian Gothic building inspired by Ruskin and recently restored. The principal collections, including skeletons of dinosaurs and skulls of our ancestors, are housed in a courtyard with a glass roof supported by columns of cast iron wrought to resemble the branches of trees. A collection of rocks, selected to represent the most important in the British Isles, is also built into the fabric of the building - each delicate pillar round the gallery is made of a different stone. The museum is probably unique in being able to exhibit the nearly-complete remains of a Dodo.
Opening hours: 10am - 5pm daily. Free entry. Wheelchair friendly. Next events at Oxford University Museum of Natural History Good wheelchair/buggy access

Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PW

Central
10am - 5pm daily. Free entry.
Telephone: 01865 272970
Fax: 01865 272950
Map
Website



Coming up:

Ghost Forest
Thu, 24 May: Free, visible at all times.

Out of the Woods
Thu, 24 May: 10am - 5pm, free entry

A Picnic In The Ghost Forest
Sun, 27 May: 12pm - 2pm FREE

Half Term Activities: Museum Masterpiece
Wed, 6 June: 1 - 4pm, free

Afternoon Activities: Bags of fun!
Tue, 24 July: 2 - 4pm, free

Summer Holiday Activities: Museum Masquerades
Thu, 23 August: 1 - 4pm, free

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Recently named by the Guardian as Britain's most family friendly museum, Oxford University's Museum of Natural History has a warm welcome for everybody. Follow the Megalosaurus footprints, one of the four dinosaurs to roam Oxfordshire in Jurassic times, along the grass verge from the Wellington Pine to enter the neo-Gothic building and find the UK's second largest Natural History collection. The Museum is open every day from 12 noon to 5pm throughout the year (except for Easter and Christmas holidays), admission is free and each visit offers a brand new experience. Visitors can stroke a stuffed cheetah and touch a giant ammonite from the widely accessible exhibits. Under a railway station style vaulted roof, decorated with wrought foliage and fruits, the story of life on earth unfolds; from single-celled organisms over 550 million years old to the development of multicellular animals and plants. The central court is dominated by a 45 foot long T rex and an Iguanodon skeleton. Another star exhibit is the stuffed Dodo bird which provided inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Beautiful displays of exotic butterflies celebrate the diversity of one of nature¹s most successful terrestrial animals, leading visitors up to the treasures tucked away on the first floor. Live exhibits of fat Madagascan hissing cockroaches, stick insects, a West African Emperor scorpion and a working bee hive show invertebrates in their natural habitats. Even higher up, the tower is home to live swifts (Apus apus), birds that spend their entire life in flight, sleeping on the wing and stopping only to breed. The balcony style of the first floor offers a fine vantage point to enjoy the columns of arches that define the central court from, each carved from a different British rock, with its collection of statues and busts of eminent scientists. Oxfordshire, in the heart of Mesozoic rocks, has limestone with a rich source of dinosaur fossils, Ardley Quarry having the greatest expanse of dinosaur footprints in Europe. The museum displays the stone used to fashion Oxford¹s architecture such as the coral rag used in our Saxon wall and the Bath stone of the Georgian terraces of Beaumont Street.

The ground floor cabinets display glittering minerals; a kaleidoscope of natural crystals including malachite from the Congo and gypsum from Tunisia. A fluorescent mineral booth displays rocks that glow in the dark. Our closest relative, 'Lucy', is displayed next to a humbling time line showing how recently Homo sapiens showed up on the fossil record (just 600,000 years ago)! The subsequent spread of modern human culture across the continents is celebrated in the Victorian atmosphere of the adjoining Pitt-Rivers ethnographic museum, where items from Captain Cook's second voyage lie amongst a totem pole and an Indian head dress.

The Museum is alive with the ideas that have shaped modern theories in Biology and is believed to be the home of Science¹s greatest victory, when Huxley successfully defended Darwin's theory of Evolution. Statues of Aristotle and Roger Bacon flank the exit, their purposeful stares inspiring many young visitors. No better place to exercise a new enthusiasm for science than in the gift shop, where a cuddly stuffed Dodo makes a super souvenir!

Lita Doolan (DI Reviewer), 14/11/05



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