Context!

The Hunterian Museum, part of the University of Glasgow, is the best University museum I’ve seen outside of Oxbridge. It’s a really beautiful building, free to enter, and has exhibits on basically everything.

The Hunterian Collection is over two hundred years old, and has picked up some wild exhibits in its time. Some of these are really weird, some are delightful, and some made my stomach churn a little (so many body parts in jars…). It’s a wonderfully offbeat collection that deserves more love – here’s five of my favourite things that I found:

#1 – The Toys that Time Forgot 🦕

For a museum with literal fossils, the thing that excited me the most was actually barely a century old. These wooden dinosaurs were built in the 1920s as souvenirs for the growing number of children coming to visit the dinosaur section of the Natural History Museum in London. Apparently this is the only complete set in existence. And they’re amazing!!!

I love how they represent paleontology as it was understood at the time – the bizarre looking theropod literally pouncing on its prey, the sauropod using its front legs to support itself on a cliff side just to reach its food.
The aboreal Hypsilophodon is my personal favourite – it’s just so cute 😭

#2 – A Thylacine Close Encounter 🔎

Thylacines went extinct relatively recently, as late as 1936 (or not at all according to Tasmanian cryptozoologists), so taxidermied examples aren’t that hard to find. But as they’re vulnerable to damage and there’s obviously a limited supply of them, most museums with thylacine remains on display take special care to preserve them as carefully as possible. The National Museum in Washington DC, for example, keeps theirs in low light conditions – visitors have to press a button to even make it visible.

Not so for the Hunterian Museum however! Their thylacine, on display on the ground floor, has no such restrictions – barring the glass case, you can get right up to it. It’s very strange getting up close to an animal that’s been dead for eighty years now.

#3- A Collection “Borrowed” From the Ashanti Kingdom 🇬🇭

These little golden weights are from the Ashanti kingdom, located around what’s now Ghana, which survived until the British ramsacked their capital city in 1896 – eventually this loot found its way into many of the UK’s museums. In recent years there’s been a growing push to repatriate many of these Ashanti artifacts back to Ghana – understandably they aren’t pleased that so much of their culture is still in museums thousands of miles away – but for now many of these objects are still on display in the UK.

The weights are tucked into a little corner on the right hand side of the main hall. There’s over four hundred little statues and shapes and they’re all gorgeous. Ethical issues aside, they’re undeniably gorgeous. My personal favourite is probably the catfish 🙂

#4 – The “Monstrosities Cabinet” 🤮

I can’t recommend the Hunterian Museum if you have a weak stomach, because some of the displays are genuinely revolting (some so much that I ended up cutting them out of this blog post). One of William Hunter’s favourite things to collect was apparently animals born with horrific birth defects, or “monstrosities” as he referred to them.

This little collection, found in the entrance hall, includes a one eyed piglet and a deer fawn with two bodies but only one head. I felt quite sick just looking at them, but they’re undeniably fascinating. Much respect for the taxidermist, who somehow managed to keep his lunch down long enough to preserve these poor animals.

#5 – A sad reminder of a forgotten beast 🐐

Already on their way out due to habitat loss, these antelope were mercilessly hunted by Dutch settlers when they arrived in South Africa, eventually becoming extinct by the 19th century – the first large African animal to do so in modern times. Unlike more charismatic recent extinctees, like dodos and ivory billed woodpeckers, the plight of the poor bluebuck never really took off – perhaps because they were essentially just antelopes that looked bluer than normal.

I’ll be honest and admit that I only know about bluebucks from Zoo Tycoon 2. It’s definitely the first time I’ve seen bluebuck remains on display, and I appreciate the Hunterian Museum for giving the antelope its own little tribute.

Helpful Information

• The Hunterian Museum is free to enter. At time of writing (mid September), the museum website stated that you needed to book a free ticket online – but I just walked in, they didn’t check my booking or anyone else’s. Like most museums they seem to have just scrapped the timeslot system at this point.
• As noted above, some of the medical exhibits are pretty grim – there’s plaster casts of cut open cadavers of pregnant women and skulls of cancer patients on display. I’d probably keep children to the lower floor of the museum – most of the upper floor is just scientific equipment anyway.
• There are toilets, although oddly the disabled loos next to the museum are in gendered restrooms. Apparently there’s gender-neutral toilets elsewhere on campus but I didn’t have time to find them sorry!
• There’s lift access to the museum. For some reason the lift is SLOW when leaving the museum floor – the doors take a full minute to close. A lady who worked there told me this is apparently a long running problem. Otherwise it works fine though.
• There’s a general University gift shop on the bottom floor of the building that sells books, hoodies etc.