Natural History Museum - for free!

As you might remember from my "1 week, 3 museums"-post, Nasjonalgalleriet is free on Thursdays. But The National Gallery is not the only museum for which you don't have to pay any admission fee once per week. (And don't ask me why it's Thursday.) When googling free things in Oslo - which is a quite relevant search request in a city like Oslo -, you'll find out that there are actually at least three museums you get into for free if you go there on a Thursday.

One of them is the Naturhistorisk Museum, the Natural History Museum. As you might have guessed from the name, it's Norway's largest and oldest museum for natural history. It consists of a geological exhibition (stones), a zoological exhibition (animals - no living ones though, since it's not a zoo!), and a botanical garden (plants).

You can probably imagine when we went there: yesterday!

After finally having found the entrance, which was a bit tricky due to the fact that the museum buildings were in the middle of the botanical garden which was surrounded by a fence, we focused on the zoological exhibition building. The geological exhibition is currently closed, and as for the botanical gardens - well, there's not a lot to see at the moment...

So I have yet another item for my "to do in spring"-list. Which might turn out to be a "only to start with in April"-list, since you can't be sure when spring will come to Oslo. Not anytime soon, I guess. :D

(On my way to the T-Bane this week.)

Anyway, so we checked out the zoological exhibition until the museum closed, which unfortunately was at 4 p.m. already. As I don't really have anything relevant to comment (I dropped out of biology class when I was 16 and only continued with chemistry and physics), I'll mainly add a bunch of photos here.

A (tiny) T-rex, like everywhere!

In the middle of zoological stuff: a few stones, supposedly the "highlights of the geological exhibition".

Looks like lemon candy, doesn't it? :D

Funny idea - sadly, they messed up "whose" and "who's"...

The signs say "valid in the whole of Svalbard" and "DANGEROUS! Don't touch!"

Just in case you're wondering: yes, there's a lot of plastic in the exhibition habitats. That's because there's a lot of plastic in the real wildlife habitats, and the museum wants to draw people's attention to this growing problem (click here for Google images to illustrate the scope of plastic in the ocean).

In the Naturhistorisk Museum, a separate part of the exhibition was dedicated to the topic of plastic. Unfortunately, this belonged to the minor part of the museum that was mainly in Norwegian. Here's the only sign with information in English that I could find:

And something funny to end this post with: we found a Trump bird! xD

Debrief: it's a golden pheasant - but that's way less funny.