With entertaining and informative exhibitions in English and Chinese, the Shanghai Natural History Museum ( 上海⾃然博物馆, Shànghǎi Zìrán Bówùguǎn; 510 West Beijing Rd, 北京⻄路510号) will intrigue and amaze, and is the ideal day out for inquisitive families.
Spread over five levels, the informative galleries include Mysterious Beginnings, with a look at how we came to be, recounting the Big Bang theory and scientific discoveries throughout the ages; and the River of Life, with hundreds of giant stuffed creatures from panda bears to leopards and crocodiles, plus full skeletons and model animatronic dinosaurs. Ways of Evolution and Future Pathways offers seriously old fossils and dinosaur eggs, and wows with incredible original bones and full-sized replicas of dinosaur skeletons. Hyper-real films depict when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. There’s also a huge section on how humans descended from apes, and a fascinating timeline of primate bones and evolutionary leaps.
The Shanghai Environs exhibition, meanwhile, takes a closer look at how the city came to be and the creatures that called Shanghai home hundreds of years ago. Smaller exhibits cover Survival, Earth’s Treasures and Ecological Diversity. Don’t miss the enormous collection of bugs, birds and butterflies on display in the lower basement, plus incredible displays of dissected species for anatomical study, including a peculiar ocean sunfish, which can produce three hundred million eggs.
Spiraling like a chambered nautilus shell and topped by a curved lawn embankment, which blends into the park’s surroundings, the museum building is something to behold in its own right. Inside, visitors can peer out of a 30m-high glass atrium, with a conical molecular-shaped glass "cell wall" representing the living organisms within.
