Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum

The museum descends from the Raffles Museum founded in 1849, whose zoological collections survived a century of institutional upheaval, and it opened in this building in 2015. Its centrepiece is three diplodocid sauropod skeletons, nicknamed Prince, Apollonia and Twinky, excavated together in Wyoming and bought as a group, which is unusual: most museums have one. The Singapore collections behind them run to about a million specimens.

Background

The museum takes its name from Lee Kong Chian, a businessman and philanthropist who worked in Malaya and Singapore from the 1930s to the 1960s, and it opened officially on 18 April 2015. Sir Stamford Raffles first proposed a natural history collection. In 1972 the collections went to the zoology department of the then University of Singapore and moved through temporary homes, including seven years at Nanyang Technological University. Today they hold more than 560,000 catalogued lots, and about 2,000 specimens are on display. A 10.6m female sperm whale nicknamed Jubi Lee, which was found in the waters off Singapore in July 2015, went on show on 14 March 2016.

Source: Wikipedia, "Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum"

What's there

• The three sauropods - diplodocid skeletons found and mounted together.
• The Raffles collections - zoological specimens going back to 1849.
• The regional biodiversity galleries - Southeast Asian species and habitats.
• The green roof - the building's planted exterior on the NUS campus.

When to go

Year round; the museum closes on Mondays and uses timed tickets that sell out at weekends and school holidays. Booking ahead is necessary. Weekday mornings are quietest.

Practical notes

Timed tickets must be booked and sell out; walking up rarely works. The museum is on a university campus and awkward to reach. It is smaller than the dinosaur billing suggests.

Nearby

Kent Ridge Park is nearby, and Gillman Barracks is east.

Key facts