On September 16, 2026, a little-known room in London's Natural History Museum reopened its doors to the public for the first time in more than 80 years.
The room, now called the Nature and Us gallery, shows visitors 50 objects from the museum's collections, some only a few decades old and others many thousands of years old. As its name suggests, the exhibition traces how humans have understood and interacted with the natural world, and how those encounters have, in turn, shaped our culture, values, and ideas. It is scheduled to run for 18 months while the museum is working toward opening a permanent gallery on similar themes in 2029.
"For the first time in over 80 years, visitors will be able to step into this beautiful historic space and explore our changing relationship with the natural world," said Doug Gurr, the museum's director.
Each object in the gallery's original wooden cases is meant to show a link between people and nature. Highlights include the skeleton of Jenny, a Victorian monk seal once shown to crowds as "the talking fish"; a copy of the jaw of a 14,300-year-old dog, one of the earliest known domesticated dogs in Britain; and a 1980s Star Wars toy covered in bryozoans, tiny coral-like animals that live in water.
Other objects show how scientific understanding has changed over time. A 400,000-year-old handaxe, found in a French quarry next to the remains of a woolly mammoth, helped show that humans have been around far longer than people once believed. It was presented at the Royal Society on May 26, 1859, six months before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
There is also a small Victorian model of one of the famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The original sculptures, first displayed in 1854 and still standing in London's Crystal Palace Park, were based on the science of their time, but later discoveries showed that some of their features were wrong. The model offers a glimpse of how early scientists and artists imagined prehistoric life.