Oxford Museum Of Natural History

Today I visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History with one of our students, Tim.   It’s housed in an impressive stone building on Parks Road.  As you enter, you walk into a huge square space that’s surrounded by columns and covered with an arched glass ceiling.  It feels almost like a cathedral – and it is: a cathedral of science.

The Museum of Natural History houses collections in Geology (including Paleontology), Mineralogy, Zoology and Entomology.  The Geology area is impressive with its massive replicas of prehistoric skeletons – from mammoths to giant whales.  There are also skeletal specimens of modern-day animals – as well as stuffed specimens (badgers, owls, tortoises, foxes, etc.). 



Skeleton of an African Elephant



Callie and a stuffed badger



Tim shaking hands with a dinosaur



The most famous replica in the museum is that of the dodo bird, which once inhabited the island of Mauritius.  Europeans help to bring about the demise of the dodo by introducing dogs and rats to the island.  By 1680 it was extinct.  Lewis Carroll made the dodo popular by putting it into his Alice in Wonderland story.

There two galleries above the main floor; one is for insects – not sure about the other one.  At the end of the main-floor hall is the entrance to the Pitt Rivers Museum, a curious and eclectic collection of artifacts (many collected in the nineteenth century) from all over the world.  Tim and I mainly explored the main floor of the Natural History Museum, but we did go into the Pitt Rivers Museum for about a half hour.  There were human skulls that head-hunters had collected, Noh theatre masks, ancient writing instruments, an Egyptian mummy with its inner and outer coffin, a collection of hookahs, a cape made out of bird feathers, a 40-ft totem pole…it was amazing, but I was soon glazing over.

From the museum we wandered over to the Vere Harmsworth Library with my librarian friend Susan.  This is one of my favorite libraries.  It’s a Bodleian library, but it’s relatively new – opened in the early 2000s, I think.  It’s light and airy – a great place to read – and it houses the American Studies Collection.  I’ve been using it for research on Basil Hall, a retired Scottish Navy Captain who wrote about Columbus on his journey to America in 1827-1828.