Mammals
In Mammals, you meet your own fellow species, from the pygmy shrew at a couple of grams to the elephant. The exhibition shows the enormous variation in mammals' form, size and adaptation, and how researchers classify them. Here you will see animals from every corner of the world and every climate zone.
What can you see in the exhibition?
In the mammal exhibition, you can see:
- The elephant: one of the largest land animals
- The pygmy shrew: weighs just a couple of grams
- Lion, antelope and other exotic species
- Walrus, seal and bat
- The extinct thylacine
- 'The nursing woman': showing what makes us mammals
Meet your fellow mammals
Why is a woman sitting nursing an infant in a display case at the museum? Because she illustrates one of the most essential traits of us mammals: females have mammary glands and nurse their young. Like other mammals, she is also warm-blooded and can keep her body temperature stable largely independent of her surroundings.
The woman in the display case is one of the most adaptable and successful mammals that has ever lived, and, from nature's point of view, one of the most dangerous. In the exhibition, you will learn more about humanity's own order in the animal kingdom, what we look like 'under the fur', and how researchers classify mammals.
For the record: the woman and child in the display are artificial. No real mammal would have bothered to sit still for that long.
From a couple of grams to 200 tonnes
Mammals can be tiny, like the pygmy shrew, which weighs only a couple of grams, or enormous, like the blue whale, which can reach almost 200 tonnes. We don't have room for a blue whale in the mammal collection, but you can say hello to an elephant. You can see a blue whale skeleton in the Whale Hall.
This is how the exhibition shows the extraordinary variation in mammals' form, size and adaptability.