The Cambridge University Zoology Museum, which closed in 2013, has re-opened after a £4 million refurbishment. See link below:- Zoology museum reopens after £4m facelift
'Inside Science' includes information about the Diprotodon. David Attenborough is officially reopening the museum on Saturday. BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, The Large Hadron Collider Upgrade, Voltaglue, Cambridge Zoology Museum, Francis Willughby
I'm a bit confused as I visited this museum a few years ago but am not sure it was as long as five years ago now(2013). I suppose it must have been if its been closed that long. I wasn't very impressed by it then, compared to(say) the Oxford one it was quite small and dull, maybe the reason for the closure and refurbishment.
I moved to Cambridge in the spring of 2014 and it was closed then, a source of considerable frustration.
I couldn't remember exactly when the museum closed; the year 2013 came from the BBC website but I've certainly walked past the museum several times in the last four or five years and noticed it was closed. I've always enjoyed my visits so, personally, I think describing the museum as dull is a little harsh; nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree that the Oxford University Zoology Museum is much more impressive. (Probably my interest in dodos is the main reason why I prefer the Oxford museum.)
I managed to pop in to the refurbished museum earlier today for about an hour. I enjoyed it immensely - the museum has been modernised and its information labels rendered much more up-to-date without really touching the actual building and simply moving around some of the collection. One thing of note is that there is also going to be a new reptile wing (including dinosaurs) that is still being constructed, due to open in autumn 2018. There are still a few reptiles on display. Some of the mammals that had previously been off-view in the latter days of the museum pre-restoration (the primates, rodents, marsupials and other small mammals) have now been moved back on show. The entire bottom level of the museum is now home to almost nothing but mammals, all arranged broadly in their taxonomic groups.
The link below provides overview of some specimens in the museum's collection. Wonders of Animal Life | Museum of Zoology On my first few visits to the museum, back in the 1980s, there were a few aquarium tanks of live fish in addition to the more usual museum specimens (skeletons and mounted skins) but they were not there on more recent visits. I haven't yet returned to the museum since it re-opened.
An awful lot of them! In all seriousness, the collection is very good specially for mammals, with the entire bottom floor almost completely dedicated to them, plus a few bottled mammal specimens on the upper floor, a few bats suspended among some British birds in glass cases above the visitor walkway and obviously the cetacean skeletons still hanging in their usual places (including the double-tusked narwhal and a pygmy right whale) - obviously the on-show reptile collection is still fairly small and the British bird gallery on the bottom floor has now been replaced with mammals which does leave the bird collection surprisingly sparse as well. The museum lacks any live animal displays. One thing I found of interest, thinking back, was seeing the Cott dioramas, made by Hugh Cott in the post-war period when it was still too costly to fund university field trips to the coast. So instead, he made a set of three dioramas representing typical seabirds of the British coastline, with two cliffside bird displays (with guillemots, razorbills, gannets and gulls) and a single very large beach display with at least ten bird species represented. I’d forgotten how much attention to detail had gone into them until I saw them again on Friday.
