Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dogs' Tails

© Natural History Museum.

The Natural History Museum in London recently opened a HUGE new exhibition centre full to the brim with jars of pickled animals. The Darwin Centre contains 22 million specimens that visitors haven't been able to see before.

The centre is named after the famous naturalist Charles Darwin, who lived from 1809 to 1882. He sailed the world and made important discoveries about nature that scientists still think about and work with today, all these years later.

All of the animals in the Darwin Centre are dead. They are kept at the museum so that scientists can study them. There are 450,000 jars of specimens in the Darwin Centre.

The jars contain alcohol - not beer or wine but pure alcohol, which stops the animals from rotting. As well as the jars there are skeletons, dried eggs, dried skins, paintings, drawings, photographs, microscope slides and much, much more.

© Natural History Museum.

One of the largest animals in the collection is this Komodo dragon (above) called Sumba that lived at London Zoo until it died in 1937.

There are football fish, lizards, beetles, snails, snakes …. The list goes on and on. One of the weirdest fish in there is the four-winged flying fish in the picture below.

© Natural History Museum.

One yucky example of what turns up is the tapeworm found inside the stomach of a killer whale that was washed up on a beach in Cornwall in 1978. The tapeworm, a parasite that lived inside the whale, is about seven metres long. Try and get a grown-up along to see that - it's sure to make them feel sick!

Click on this link to find out more about the Darwin Centre - it makes an incredible day out. Let me know if you find any puppy dogs' tails won't you?