Wonders of diversity

In the Wonders of diversity exhibition, you can see:

• Barbary lions: no longer found in the wild
• The thylacine: exterminated by sheep farmers in the 1930s
• The thigh bone of a giant dinosaur from Tanzania, 150 million years old
• A warning about the sixth mass extinction of species

An extraordinary capacity for adaptation has produced an astonishing diversity of life on Earth. Today, around 1.5 million different species have been recorded, yet researchers believe a further 7–8 million species remain undiscovered. And that is without even counting microorganisms such as bacteria.

The exhibition offers a glimpse into what biological diversity is, how it changes, and how we study it. What is a species, and how do we classify and distinguish species from one another? How can we tell who is a close relative and who merely resembles another? And how does new knowledge force us to rethink the origin and evolution of species?

Alongside celebrating the biological diversity found on Earth today, the exhibition looks back at species that no longer exist. Here you can see magnificent specimens of Barbary lions, which no longer live in the wild, a thylacine that was exterminated by Australian sheep farmers in the 1930s, and the thigh bone of a giant dinosaur that lived in Tanzania 150 million years ago.

The exhibition also carries a warning. You may have heard of the sixth mass extinction of species? We are living through it right now, and unlike the five previous extinctions, this time we humans bear the main responsibility for the rapid decline in biological diversity.

At the same time, there is hope in knowing that human activity affects biodiversity. That means we can make choices and act to better protect diversity in the future. We must simply remember that biological diversity rests on a delicate interplay between many species. That is why the loss of a single species can have consequences that are difficult to foresee.