[4][5] Reports detailing the museum's activities and acquisitions were presented to the committee of the borough, city and corporation of Liverpool annually.

The competition was won by Edward William Mountford and the College of Technology and Museum Extension opened in 1901.

One of the exhibits destroyed in 1941 was the little 20 ft (6.1 m) yawl City of Ragusa, which twice crossed the Atlantic in 1870 and 1871 with a crew of two men.

[7][8] The museum underwent a £35 million refurbishment in 2005 in order to double the size of the display spaces and make more of the collections accessible for visitors.

Major new galleries included "World Cultures", the "Bug House" and the "Weston Discovery Centre".

[9] The physical sciences collection of World Museum was built after the devastation caused by the incendiary fire of 1941.

The quality of the Mayer donation is high and there are some outstanding items, but with a few exceptions the entire collection is unprovenanced.

Large parts of the collection had been removed at the outbreak of the war, but much remained on display or in store and many artefacts were destroyed.

This included EES excavated material from Amarna and other sites, botanical remains from Kahun and the private collection of Sir Henry Rider Haggard.

Visitors can examine the collections up close in the award-winning[17] Clore Natural History Centre, where there are interactive displays.

The reserve collection includes animals from famous naturalists[30] such as Charles Darwin,[31] Alfred Russel Wallace,[32] John James Audubon, William Thomas March,[33] John Whitehead[34] and Stamford Raffles,[35] transfers from other museums (Selangor Museum,[36][37] India Museum[38][39]), circuses (Barnum and Bailey[40]) and zoos (Southport Zoological Gardens[41], Chester Zoo); and collections from the museum's expeditions[42].There also specimens of several extinct species housed in the museum, including the Liverpool pigeon,[43] the great auk (an egg),[44] the Falkland Islands wolf,[45] the South Island piopio, the Lord Howe swamphen, the Passenger pigeon, the dodo,[46][47] the Pink-headed duck,[48] the Norfolk kākā, the Stephens Island wren, the Bushwren, the Carolina Parakeet, the Cuban Macaw,[49] the long-tailed hopping mouse and the thylacine.

[48][38]The museum had extensive public galleries containing vertebrate taxidermy specimens, but these were lost when during the air raids of May 1941 the building was completely destroyed by fire.

[50] Some mammal specimens from the original 13th Earl of Derby collection did survive,[51] along with most of the cabinet bird skins.

[56]The current natural history gallery is called Endangered Planet and features a limited number of taxidermy vertebrates in four diorama representing biomes, savanna, tropical rainforest, taiga, tundra.

[59]The museum's collections have grown considerably since then and now also include important botanical specimens dating back over 200 years, which represent most of Britain and Ireland's native flora.

In a statement, the director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, said that the "authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China.