The Oxford Natural History Museum

If you are in Oxford to study, for a conference or just for a holyday, take some hours off and go to “The Oxford Natural History Museum”, you can’t miss such unbelievable experience. This place has an interesting story to tell. You will walk around dinosaurs and other extinct animals, you will able to touch the stone and the minerals that come from the dinosaurs’ age. You will go through all the ages and all the five animal kingdoms in a really witty way.

The museum is located in Parks Road close to city centre. There is a garden in front of the main gate that usually houses outdoor displays. Take some minutes to enjoy this space and especially to relish the sight of the neo-gothic palace. It was built in 1861 by the Irish architects Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward. When you are inside you will be hit by the glass roof which allows the sun to light everything. There are three aisles in the main room, full of sculptures of scientists, and cloistered arcades run around for the ground and the first floor. I was astonished to see that each column was made from a different stone.

On the ground under the arcades you will see a smart way to place the finds. They don’t follow a subject order but a chronological sequence, so you will see the T-rex with the plants and stones of its age. People and especially children enjoy this place take pictures of their heads between the huge dinosaur jaws.

You will get the way of the dodo. This extinct flightless bird is the mascot of the museum. The dodo story is fascinating, it came from Mauritius but after the colonization it got extinction really quickly because of hunting and pigs, since they were in competition for the same source of food. In Oxford there was the last dodo still alive, it was fat because of a wrong diet. This fat bird was featured as a character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With the book’s popularity, the Dodo become a well-known icon of extinction.

What has really shocked me is the beehive. On the first floor near a window there is a glass beehive, it is link to the window by a tunnel and you can see the bees go out and come in. Watching the bees talk each other is amazing; they are able to talk thanks to a special dance, “the waggle dance”. If you have a watchful eye, you will see the queen; she is marked with a red spot.



In this museum something that is really important for our way to see the world happened.  Among its walls there has been the famous debate about “the evolutionary theory”. The two important lecturers were the bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the scientist Thomas Huxley. It is funny see that the museum was built to show the wonders of God’s creation and at the end it shows the proofs of Darwin’s evolution.

I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled the surprise to discover everything by your own, but trust me this place is very big, and there are a lot of things that I couldn’t say.