A Natural History Museum, one of trine big museums located on Exhibition Road, Kensington, London (a others come the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum), is home to life & globe science collections comprising a few 70 million specimens or even things. There are 5 independent collections: Botany, Entomology, Mineralogy, Palaeontology and Zoology.

A museum is noted for its Central Hall & its exhibition of dinosaur skeletons, particularly the big Diplodocus cast which dominates the entrance.

the foundation of the collection was a legacy by Irish doctor Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Sloane's collection, which involved dried plants, & beast & man skeletons, was at the start housed around Montague House in Bloomsbury in 1756, and was considered a portion of the British Museum. In the late 1850s, Professor Richard Owen, Superintendent of the natural department of history of the British Museum, became confident that the natural history departments required a large, separate building.

L& inside South Kensington was purchased, and inside 1864 a competition was held to design a newly museum. A winning entry was submitted by Captain Francis Fowke who died shortly afterwards. A scheme was taken above by Alfred Waterhouse who substantially revised a around agreement plans, & designed the façades in his have idiosyncratic Romanesque style. Function began within 1873 and was completed in 1880. A recently museum opened within 1881, although a move from either the old museum was non fully completed until 1883. Each a interiors & exteriors mass produced extensive apply of terracotta bricks to resist the sooty climate of Victorian London. A terracotta for the interior & exterior was manufactured per notable Gibbs And Canning Limited of Tamworth. A bricks include numerous images of plants, creature & fossils. A central axis of a museum is aligned by owning the tower of Imperial College (formerly a Imperial Institute) and a Royal Albert Hall and Albert Memorial further north. These tons form a portion of the complex called Albertopolis.

Legally, it remained a department of the British Museum, & its formal title was the British Museum (Natural History), typically abbreviated in the scientific literature as B.M.(N.H.). Inside 1963, the Natural History Museum eventually became an independent museum by using its have Board of Trustees, & inside 1986 absorbed the adjacent Geological Museum of the British Geological Survey. Still it was non until a Museums & Galleries Work of 1992 that a Museum's formal title was eventually changed from either B.M.(North.H.) to The Natural History Museum.

In the 1990s the Geological Museum's mineralogy displays, previously described when "just a collection of rocks in cabinets", were entirely rebuilt & relaunched within 1998 as a multimedia exhibition entitled A Globe Galleries. At a equivalent instance, a more departments in the Waterhouse building were retitled A Life Galleries. A Natural History Museum's have Mineralogy displays remain unchanged for instance of the nineteenth century display techniques of the Waterhouse building.

A newly-developed Darwin Centre (known as for Charles Darwin) holds a collection of hundreds to thousands of preserved specimens, interactional materials & fresh workspaces for the Museum's scientific staff. Lectures & demonstrations occur day-to-day, & come occasionally webcast. A shared out space is designed to bring visitant into close email by owning working man of science. Phase one of a Darwin Centre has been completed, & houses a Zoological department's spirit collections - organisms preserved around alcohol. Phase deuce of a design provides the Entomology collections and Botanical collections under the equivalent (fresh) roof. As of 2005, a Entomology Department is storing its collection prior to the building is pulled down & replaced.

A nearest London Underground station is South Kensington.

The Natural History Museum from the south east