The emphasis is on items from the Manawatū-Whanganui region, but the collection also includes objects of national and international significance, such as Pacific tapa, ceramics from Asia and Cyprus, and moa bones from nearby Makirikiri Swamp.

Their unkempt appearance and lack of interest in the displays, however, aroused suspicion in the director, J. Burnet, who then identified one of the men from a newspaper photograph.

[2] In September 2016 the museum was closed to the public for earthquake strengthening, reconstruction and refurbishment, with exhibitions continuing at the old Post Office building at 62 Ridgway Street.

[12] The moa collection was documented and analysed in 1989 by palaeontologist Trevor Worthy, who was able to group the bones statistically into age and species classes.

[13] At the end of the 1890s, J. Burnet found a headless moa skeleton in Wanganui East, which was acquired by the museum and assembled by R. Murdoch.

[12] As the museum's Curator of Natural History noted: The Whanganui collection is one of the most important in the world because it has stayed almost completely intact, which lets scientists study an entire community of moa trapped in the swamp over thousands of years: their age, growth rate, size and male/female ratio.

The collection is held at the Alexander Turnbull Library and Whanganui Regional Museum, and in 2024 was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register.