A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a museum with exhibits about natural history , including such topics as animals , plants , ecosystems , geology , paleontology , and climatology. Some museums feature natural-history collections in addition to other collections, such as ones related to history, art and science.
Nature centers often include natural history exhibits. Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were private collections that typically included exotic specimens of natural history, sometimes faked, along with other types of object. The first natural history museum was possibly that of Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner , established in Zurich in the mid 16th century. Early natural history museums offered limited accessibility, as they were generally private collections or holdings of scientific societies.
The Ashmolean Museum , opened in , was the first natural history museum to grant admission to the general public. The museum's website provides an overview in the form of a virtual tour. The museum's earliest collections of artifacts were begun over years ago. Today, its collections on display cover 8, square metres 94, sq ft. As of , the museum houses approximately 30 million objects and the number is growing.
Behind the scenes, collections comprising some 25 million specimens and artefacts are the essential basis for the work of over 60 staff scientists. Their main fields of research cover a wide range of topics from the origins of the Solar System and the evolution of animals and plants to human evolution, as well as prehistoric traditions and customs.
The main building of the Museum is an elaborate palace that has accommodated these constantly growing collections, since opening to the public in as the Imperial Natural History Museum. However, some of the collections had been moved from even older buildings, such as the Hofbibliothek which contained the Zoology Cabinet German: Tierkabinett collections.
