Great A-level day with Altrincham Grammar School

A couple of weeks ago we had a great A-level day with students from Altrincham Grammar School. Louise Sutherland (from the learning team) and I met the group of students at about 10 and we went up to the Life Lab for the workshops. We began with the drawing fossils workshop, concentrating on bivalves, brachiopods [...]

Celebrate Darwin’s 201st birthday this Saturday

Join us at The Manchester Museum this Saturday to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 201st birthday. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, transformed the way we understand the natural world.  We are celebrating his birthday with a range of activities and tours for all ages. Experts will be on hand to talk about Darwin’s ideas and [...]

Manchester Museum – a great focus for Life Long Learning

Curators and collections staff make a massive contribution to life long learning here at the museum, be we don’t often tell people about it and the impact it has on people’s lives. We help the museum come alive for everyone from small children to older people. I regularly get asked what my job involves and [...]

Last Christmas post

This is my last post before my Christmas break. Here’s the view from my office window to prove we have a slight dusting of snow. It has been a great year. We have opened the Manchester Gallery and the Darwin The Evolutionist exhibition as part of our Darwin festival. We have continued to run and [...]

Ammonites help tell Manchester about Darwin

Staff and volunteers here at the museum have just finished putting together objects for our Darwin outreach programme.  About 20 objects will be taken to community groups around Manchester in the new year to help talk about our Darwin exhibition. Some of the most exciting objects are a collection of ammonites showing evolution over millions [...]

Manchester’s fossil stores open to the world!

Take a look round our vertebrate fossil store with the first of our new video tours:

The Joys of Documentation

I’m catching up with some documentation. For those of you who aren’t so familiar with museums, this means transferring information from objects to our computer database. As you might imagine, with a collection of over 70,000 fossils this is quite a big job, but very rewarding. Myself and Rebecca Machin (Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences) [...]

Darwin exhibition opens tomorrow

Our fantastic new Darwin Exhibition opens tomorrow! The exhibition called Charles Darwin: evolution of a scientist follows Darwin’s amazing life and discoveries. His ideas are illustrated with an incredible array of objects, many of which Darwin collected himself on his travels. The exhibition forms part of our year long Darwin festival which includes a range [...]