Natural history museum

Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were private collections that typically included exotic specimens of national history, sometimes faked, along with other types of object.

The first natural history museum was possibly that of Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner, established in Zürich in the mid-16th century.

[2] Early natural history museums offered limited accessibility, as they were generally private collections or holdings of scientific societies.

Civic and university buildings did exist to house collections used for conducting research, however these served more as storage spaces than museums by today's understanding.

[6] The mid-eighteenth century saw an increased interest in the scientific world by the middle class bourgeoisie who had greater time for leisure activities, physical mobility and educational opportunities than in previous eras.

As wealthy nations began to collect exotic artifacts and organisms from other countries, this problem continued to worsen.

[11] Opportunities for a new public audience coupled with overflowing artifact collections led to a new design for natural history museums.

Naturalists such as American Joseph Leidy pushed for greater emphasis on the biological perspective in exhibits to teach the public more about the functional relationships between organisms.