Rare, Endangered and Beautiful

12 December 2009 – 25 April 2010

Gallery Oldham’s natural history collection includes over 60,000 specimens. We have a wide range of animals, plants and minerals, some of which are 500 million years old!

The majority of the museum’s collections were acquired in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when there was a great enthusiasm for what was a relatively new science. With neither television nor colour photography to study wildlife, people relied on the physical collection of specimens to increase their knowledge and understanding of the field.

With climate change and habitat loss threatening today’s wildlife, this exhibition gives a glimpse of some of the gems in a collection that contains numerous endangered and extinct species