Earth - A Planet and its Life
A further twelve new permanent displays have been installed completing the transformation of our main court that began in 2020.
This phase of the redisplay project, titled Earth: A Planet and Its Life, is generously supported by funding from Biffa Award, a multi-million pound fund that helps to build communities and transform lives through awarding grants to communities and environmental projects across England and Northern Ireland as part of the Government's Landfill Communities Fund.
The project will use the Museum’s collections – including historically significant Oxfordshire Dinosaur material – to tell a story of the intricate relationships between planet and life, through evidence of ancient ecosystems. Alongside the twelve new displays, visitors will enjoy revamped touchable specimens and a digital interactive ‘pod’ that recreates Cambrian and Jurassic ocean environments.
Some of the 36 completed displays in the Museum's Main Court
Housed in six new conservation-grade showcases, the exhibits will feature a visually striking combination of fossil and skeletal specimens, along with bespoke models and stylised environmental setworks to recreate past ecosystems and key points in the evolution of life on Earth. Combined with the 36 displays installed over the past five years, the project completes a major element in the Museum’s 'Life, As We Know It' masterplan.
While the new displays are under development, a temporary exhibition of the spectacular high-magnification insect photography of Levon Biss will run in the new showcases until 4 January 2026. Each of the eleven insects in the Microsculpture exhibition is shown alongside 1.2 metre prints of Biss’s photographs, revealing the incredible 'microsculpture’ structures of the animals.
