- published: 06 May 2013
- views: 117917
A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a museum with exhibits about natural history, including such topics as animals, plants, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, and climatology. Some museums feature natural-history collections in addition to other collections, such as ones related to history, art and science. Nature centers often include natural history exhibits.
Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were private collections that typically included exotic specimens of natural history, sometimes faked, along with other types of object. The first natural history museum was possibly that of Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner, established in Zurich in the mid 16th century. The Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, established in Paris in 1635, was the first natural history museum to take the form that would be recognized as a natural history museum today. Early natural history museums offered limited accessibility, as they were generally private collections or holdings of scientific societies. The Ashmolean Museum, opened in 1683, was the first natural history museum to grant admission to the general public.
Natural history is the research and study of organisms including animals, fungi and plants in their environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. It encompasses scientific research but is not limited to it, with articles nowadays more often published in science magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. That is a very broad designation in a world filled with many narrowly focused disciplines. So while natural history dates historically from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the mediaeval Arabic world, through to European Renaissance naturalists working in near isolation, today's field is more of a cross discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences. For example, geobiology has a strong multi-disciplinary nature combining scientists and scientific knowledge of many specialty sciences.
A person who studies natural history is known as a naturalist or natural historian.
Unscrew your face from the laptop screen,
See the people, the places in your, magazine,
They're a bigheaded bunch, d'ya know what I mean,
Someone made them out of plastercine,
Chorus
I'm the morning rain,
It's me again, I wont go away,
I'm the morning rain,
It's me again, I wont, go, a, way.
Come down off your barbed wire fence,
What you're saying sounds stupid, makes know sense,
It may be used later in your defence,
It may be used later as, evidence for the
Chorus
Undo your head from the sink plug chain,
Unscrew the cheap wine, and drink like a drain,
You may never want to waltz again,
You may never want to walk away from the
Chorus
Pack your bags, your rooms for let,
They're putting up the barricades and laying off all bets,
I've never seen so many people, smoke so many cigarettes,
Pack your bags now, your room for rent.....