Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester. It is one of the top university museums in the United Kingdom. Sitting at the heart of the University's neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about six million items from every continent of the globe.
Some of the main collections include:
Butterflies and carvings from India
Birds and bark-cloth from the Pacific
Live frogs and ancient pottery from The Americas
Fossils and native art from Australia
Mammals and ancient Egyptian craftsmanship from Africa
Plants, coins and minerals from Europe
Art from past civilisations of the Mediterranean
Beetles
Armour
"Simon archery collection"
Cast of a fossilised Tyrannosaurus rex from South Dakota 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, Owen’s College (now the University of Manchester) accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867.
The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of London’s Natural History Museum, 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. (...) more....