Museum of Mystery launched!

The Manchester Museum has launched a fantastic new website called:

The interactive website helps you answer some of the most important questions on earth such as:

Why do animals and plants need each other?

What happened to the dinosaurs?

What helps species survive?

I know I am biased, but obviously the best bit is the geology. You can hear me talking about meteorites and the extinction of the dinosaurs and climate change.

There’s a great range of videos from our experts here at the museum from why did the Dodo die out to tropical leaf frogs, so why not have a look.

Living Worlds gallery: collecting minerals

One of my favorite cases on the new Living Worlds gallery here at the Manchester Museum is about collecting.

One of the main things we wanted to do on the gallery was put people at the heart of nature. Lots of people’s most memorable experience of nature (including myself) is going out into our countryside and parks to unwind and have a nice day out. Often this involves collecting photographs and objects.

Opal

This was a fantastic opportunity to get out some of our more spectacular minerals from the museum’s collection. I know I  am biased, but the range of specimens from opal to graphite looks amazing!

To find out more about responsible collection and geo-conservation please visit the Natural England website.

We are having a Big Saturday to celebrate the opening of the Living Worlds gallery this Saturday (the 7th of May). It would be great to see you there to handle some object and find out more about the displays.

New Living Worlds Gallery open!

I’m delighted to say the Living Worlds Gallery here at The Manchester Museum is now open to the public!

We had an amazing launch party last night with Deadly 60’s Steve Backshall on hand to help open the gallery.

We have tried to do something very different in the new gallery, which hopefully you will all love. In contrast to the old mammals gallery we have put people and the amazing world around us at the heart of the gallery.

There is a great review of the gallery on David Quinn’s blog

A really exciting development is the smart phone app (search for ‘Living Worlds’ in your app store). This gives you a range of extra information about the amazing story lines, interviews with people who care passionately about nature and information about what to do next.

I’ll be doing more blog posts after Easter on my gallery highlights and some of the stunning new geology on display for the first time.

There are more images on our Flickr set.