Sited on Oxford Road (A34) at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about 4.5 million items from every continent.

It is the UK’s largest university museum and serves both as a major visitor attraction and as a resource for academic research and teaching.

[3] The society established a museum in Peter Street, Manchester, on a site later occupied by the Young Men's Christian Association, in 1835.

By the 1860s both societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College (now the University of Manchester) accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867.

At the time, the scientific departments of the college were immediately adjacent, and students entered the galleries from their teaching rooms in the Beyer Building.

The 1912 pavilion was largely funded by Jesse Haworth, a textile merchant, to house the archaeological and Egyptological collections acquired through excavations he had supported.

The Gothic Revival street frontage which continues to the Whitworth Hall has been ingeniously integrated by three generations of the Waterhouse family.

When the adjacent University Dental Hospital of Manchester moved to a new site, its old building was used for teaching and subsequently occupied by the museum.

[7] The museum is one of the University of Manchester's 'cultural assets', along with the Whitworth Art Gallery, John Rylands Library, Jodrell Bank visitor centre and others.

Discovering Archaeology explores how people make sense of the past using objects and includes exhibits on facial reconstruction and some of the characters who were involved in the development of archaeology and the museum, including William Flinders Petrie and William Boyd Dawkins.

In June 2013 time-lapse footage showing a 10-inch Egyptian statue in the museum's collection, apparently spinning around unaided, attracted worldwide media attention.

In 2004 the museum acquired a reproduction cast of a fossil Tyrannosaurus rex which is mounted in a running posture.

[citation needed] Alchemy was a project initiating and facilitating artists' access to the museum and university.

As part of the Revealing Histories: Remembering Slavery project, it explored difficult and sensitive issues.

The Egyptological collections include finds from Kahun and Gurob, presented in 1890 by Jesse Haworth and Martyn Kennard.

By 1912 the growth of this area had been so great that a new wing was added for the Egyptian material to which Jesse Haworth made a major donation of funds.

[19] The Egyptian Mummy Research Project, begun in 1973 under Rosalie David's direction, has yielded much information on health and social conditions in ancient Egypt and radiology and endoscopy have been used extensively.

From 1914 to 1933 he held the world record for a flight-shot at 462 yards; he died in 1964 and his widow Erna (lady world champion, 1937, died 1973) endowed a trust to conserve and develop the collection which includes artefacts from Great Britain, Brazil, Europe, India, Pakistan, Japan, Central Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands.

[26] Inger K. Frith, President of the Fédération Internationale de Tir à l'Arc from 1961 to 1977, was very involved in the curation and setting up of the collection.

The remainder of the collection is of foreign origin and W. D. Hincks and John R. Dibb contributed great quantities of specimens, particularly of Coleoptera.

Harold Raby succeeded Steinthal as honorary keeper and they were responsible for work on the arrangement and identification of the coins.

[34] The museum's collection of live amphibians, housed in the Vivarium, includes some of the most critically endangered neotropical species in the world.

The Vivarium's displays offer an opportunity to observe the behaviour of a wide variety of species from Madagascar, South and Central America, and Australasia, in naturalistic exhibits.

The maintenance of the museum's live animals operates under the highest Zoo Licence standards to ensure their health and care is optimised.

These form part of non-invasive research projects and captive breeding programmes to support the in-situ and ex-situ conservation of the species concerned.

[36] Type material is found in the collections of Alexander Abercrombie (India), Robert Dukinfield Darbishire, Professor Alfred Cort Haddon (Torres Straits), Reverend James Hadfield (Lifu, Loyalty Islands), Lewis John Shackleford (especially Marginella), George Cooper Spence (especially African land snails and Urocoptis and many specimens from Matthew William Kemble Connolly and Hugh Berthon Preston), Frederick W. Townsend (Persian Gulf), syntype material from the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902–1904) and that received from the Smithsonian Institution in 1973 in an exchange.

This was the first phase of the project coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's first voyage to Australia in 2020, working to repatriate a large number of artefacts from foreign museums.

The next phase of the project is to bring back 40 culturally significant objects from the Manchester Museum, including "body ornaments made from feathers, teeth and wood, hair bundles and belts".

[37] In November 2019 the Museum returned 43 secret sacred and ceremonial items from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders communities back to Australia.

The director for culture and emergencies at UNESCO, Krista Pikkat, said "May this occasion be a source of inspiration, encouraging others to embark on similar journeys.