Founded in 1828 for the purposes of teaching comparative anatomy, University College London’s Grant Museum is housed in a former Edwardian library and retains the air of an avid Victorian collector’s house, even while offering visitors the opportunity to engage in dialogue about evolutionary history via smartphones and iPads.
Its 68,000 specimen collection encompasses many rare and extinct creatures, including skeletons of the dodo and the zebra-like quagga (which lived in South Africa and was hunted out of existence in the 1880s), as well as plenty of real oddities, not least the jar of moles.
Reopened in February 2024 after a year-long £300,000 refurb, the Bloomsbury museum now features six new showcases exploring humanity’s impact on biodiversity and highlighting the use of the collections in several cutting-edge research projects conducted by the university.