Manchester Museum

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Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester

University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a "red brick university" civic university located in Manchester, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration....
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The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester

University of Manchester

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
. Sitting at the heart of the University's neo-Gothic

Gothic Revival architecture

The Gothic Revival is an Architectural style which began in the 1740s in England. Its popularity grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century, when increasingly serious and learned admirers of neo-Gothic styles sought to revive Middle Ages forms in contrast to the Neoclassical architecture styles which were then prevalent....
buildings, it provides access to about six million items from every continent of the globe.

Some of the main collections include:

Butterflies
Butterfly

A butterfly is an insect of the Order Lepidoptera. Like all Lepidoptera, butterflies are notable for their unusual Biological life cycle with a larval caterpillar stage, an inactive pupal stage, and a spectacular metamorphosis into a familiar and colourful winged adult form....
and carvings from India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
Birds and bark-cloth from the Pacific
Live frog
Frog

Frogs are amphibians in the order Anura , formerly referred to as Salientia . The name frog derives from Old English language frogga, , cognate with Sanskrit plava , probably deriving from Proto-Indo-European language praw = "to jump"....
s and ancient pottery from The Americas
Fossil
Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or trace fossil of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous Rock formations and sedimentary rock layers is known as the fossil record....
s and native art from Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
Mammals and ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
ian craftsmanship from Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
Plants, coins and minerals from Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
Art from past civilisations of the Mediterranean
Beetle
Beetle

Beetles are the group of insects with the largest number of known species. They are placed in the order Coleoptera , which contains more described species than in any other order in the animal, constituting about 25% of all known life-forms....
s
Armour
Armour

Armour or armor is protective covering used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an individual or a vehicle through use of direct contact weapons or projectiles, usually during combat....
"Simon archery collection"
Cast of a fossilised Tyrannosaurus rex
Tyrannosaurus

Tyrannosaurus is a genus of theropod dinosaur. The famous species Tyrannosaurus rex , commonly abbreviated to T. rex, is a fixture in popular culture around the world....
from South Dakota
South Dakota

South Dakota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States of the United States of America. It is named after the Lakota people and Sioux Sioux Native Americans in the United States tribes....
called "Stan", which was unveiled on 4 November 2004.

The first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History, formed in 1821, and in 1850 the collections of the Manchester Geological Society were added.

Unfortunately the societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the great evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley

Thomas Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley Privy Councillor Royal Society was an English people biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
, Owen’s College (now the University of Manchester) accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867.

The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse

Alfred Waterhouse

Alfred Waterhouse was an England architect, particularly associated with the Victorian era Gothic revival. He is perhaps best known for his design for the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country....
, the architect of London’s Natural History Museum

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London . Its main frontage is on Cromwell Road. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...
, to design a museum to house these collections for the benefit of students and the public on a new site in Oxford Road. The Manchester Museum was opened to the public in the late 1880s.

Two subsequent extensions mirror the development of the collections. The 1912 ‘pavilion’ was largely funded by Jesse Haworth, a local textile merchant, to house the archaeological and Egyptological collections acquired through excavations he had supported. The 1927 extension was built to house the ethnographic collections. The Gothic Revival street frontage has been ingeniously integrated by three generations of the Waterhouse family.

In 1997 the Museum was awarded a £12.5 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and this, together with monies from the European Regional Development Fund, The University of Manchester, The Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around ?15 billion, it is the United Kingdom's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research....
, The Wolfson Foundation

Wolfson Foundation

The Wolfson Foundation is a Foundation based in London, set up in 1955. Grants are made to registered charities in the UK ...
and other sponsors has enabled the Museum to undertake the refurbishment and building which opened in 2003.

In 2004 the museum acquired a reproduction cast of a fossil Tyrannosaurus rex which is mounted in a running posture. "Stan" as he is called is based on the second most complete T. rex ever found and was excavated in 1992 in South Dakota, USA by Stan Sacrison.

Recent projects include Alchemy (2003 to current), a project initiating and facilitating artists access to The Manchester Museum and The University of Manchester. Funded by Arts Council England it offers four Alchemy Artist Fellowships, curates artist interventions in the permanent galleries and facilitate artists research and the loan of The Manchester Museum's collections for contemporary art projects. Alchemy is the Museum's first sustained research programme for artists. Through supporting artists research and the creation of new work, Alchemy aims to reinvigorate Museum displays, encourage diverse approaches and present alternative voices.

In August 2007, a new temporary exhibition 'Myths About Race' was opened . Many Victorian institutions, including The Manchester Museum, contributed to the same racist thinking that had justified slavery. As part of the Revealing Histories: Remembering Slavery project, it begins to explore the difficult and sensitive issues. Visitors are asked to question the displays in the rest of the Museum, and to help the Museum shape its future. Revealing Histories is part of a larger Greater Manchester initiative looking at the legacy and impacts of the slave trade.

In April 2008 a new exhibition opened at the Museum lasting until April 2009, which will have the Lindow Man

Lindow man

Lindow Man, also known as Lindow II and Pete Marsh, is the name given to the naturally-preserved bog body of an Iron Age man, discovered in a peat bog at Lindow Moss, Mobberley side of the border with Wilmslow, Cheshire, northwest England, on 1 August 1984 by commercial peat-cutters....
on display. This exhibit was on show prior to this at the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture situated in London. Its collections, which number more than 7 million Object , are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present....
in London.

Manchester Museum

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