The Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History opened in 1860 and originally housed all of Oxford science.

Today, this extraordinary Victorian, neo-gothic building houses the natural history collections of the University. The displays range from the reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs, the Oxford Dodo, minerals and meteorites, to live insects and touchable birds and fossils.

These displays are housed beneath a spectacular glass roof supported on iron columns, and surrounded by statues of eminent scientists. The plants of the world, carved in stone, are recorded in the bases and capitals of the columns supporting the arcades.

It was here in 1860, that the celebrated debate on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species took place between the Bishop of Oxford, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Henry Huxley. It was here too that Nobel Laureate, Dorothy Hodgkin, worked for many years.