Let’s conserve it

The museum’s collection contains nearly 400,000 objects. Why and especially how these natural history objects are preserved, is the subject of the exhibition ‘Let’s conserve it’. In the completely renovated Museum Classroom (thanks to support from the Friends of the Museum), you can see how a dead bird is preserved, why some animals are preserved in liquid, why fossils do not disintegrate and how the shell collection is preserved. The accompanying film shows how the museum's taxidermists process plants, butterflies, a fox and a wood mouse into collection items. Unique archive footage from 1996 shows the boning of our sperm whale on Kijkduin beach.

There are educational activities in ‘Let’s conserve it’, such as the pairing game, where children can guess which meal belongs to which animal skull.