Life
In the Life exhibition, you first encounter animals from distant pasts that no longer exist: fossils and skeletons of creatures that once roamed, swam and flew, and that now tell the story of how life is interconnected. Because it is: all organisms on Earth, from the smallest microbes to the largest mammals, share a common origin and are bound together in a finely woven network of dependencies. And you are part of it.
The exhibition is a celebration of life in all its forms: wonderfully complex, sometimes strange and often surprising. Here, you can explore more than 2,000 genuine objects from the museum’s collections: plants, animals and fungi side by side. These objects are not decoration; they are evidence. Study evolution right before your eyes.
The journey takes you from the earliest traces of life to the diversity of the present day, from dinosaurs to peacock butterflies, from whale hearts to hairless naked mole-rats. Along the way, you will learn more about the fundamental principles of evolution, which reveal themselves time and again in countless different forms.
What you can experience
There is no set route through the exhibition, and almost everything you encounter is real. Plants, animals and fungi are part of the journey throughout, because the principles of life apply across all forms of living things.
What is life? Start with the big question and discover what life and death really are: two inseparably connected phases of the same biological process. Life continues because it reuses itself: the substances in your body were once part of plants, animals or other organisms, long before they became part of you.
Life gets names. Science has given all living things a shared language, allowing researchers across countries and centuries to talk about the same species. Explore the Tree of Life and discover what a species is – and where you fit on one of its branches. Meet the ‘narluga’, a real hybrid between a narwhal and a beluga whale.
The body. Encounter bodies in all their many forms: giant crabs, tapeworms, water lilies and naked mole-rats. Discover what you have in common with the smallest microbe and the largest whale. Place your hand on the giant heart and listen to the heartbeats of a human, a shrew and a diving whale, or explore the inside of the body on the digital dissection table. Look at yourself in the mirror and see all the life living on and inside you: your body is an ecosystem.
Evolution. Variation, selection, adaptation: these same three principles, repeated time and again, have shaped all life. Press the button and watch the dinosaur chicken lose its feathers; try the natural selection game: which organism will survive? And see how roses, mice and badgers demonstrate that variation is the driving force of life, not a flaw.
The study area. At the heart of the exhibition, you can handle real plants, bones and fossilised wood. Draw, measure, compare and study, or take a seat and enjoy the butterflies. Here, you can follow in the footsteps of a researcher and discover, reflect, interpret and create for yourself.
The waves of life. Compare fossils of animals and plants from the past with life today, and see how evolution, as a biological principle, has shaped – and continues to shape – life on our planet. The journey takes you from the earliest traces of life and the Cambrian explosion to the worlds of dinosaurs, megafauna and life today, and past the Mausoleum of the Extinct, where the dodo and the great auk stand as reminders of what is lost when species become extinct.
- The dinosaur Misty: Meet the 17-metre-long Diploducus longus, the museum’s very own dinosaur, and discover when and where it lived on the giant timeline.
- The biodiversity wall: Stand before a huge wall displaying life in all its forms – plants, fungi, algae, animals and microbes – and explore the diversity of life.
- A giant heart: Place your hand on the giant heart and listen to the heartbeats of a human, a shrew and a diving whale.
- South America’s megafauna: Come face to face with the giant ground sloth, armadillo and sabre-toothed cat – extinct giants from the distant past – and see their living relatives.
- The Mausoleum of the Extinct: See the dodo and the great auk, and hear the story of the species we have lost in recent times.
- The whale heart: This heart belonged to a bowhead whale. It weighs a full 100 kg and comes from a 33-year-old whale caught in 2010 by local hunters in West Greenland.
- Your ecosystem: Look at yourself in the mirror and discover all the life living on and inside you.
- The study area: Handle real plants, bones
All life is related
Life is not a ladder with humans standing on the top rung. Life is a tree, and we are just one branch among millions.
All living organisms today share the same origin: the first single-celled organisms, which emerged billions of years ago and eventually evolved into everything from bacteria to blue whales. You can see this kinship with your own eyes in the skeletons, hearts and cells of different species: your heart beats like a shrew’s, your skin breathes like a leaf, and your bones share the same basic evolutionary structure as those of a giant ground sloth. The differences are matters of size, shape and function; the rest is variation on the same theme.
That is why it makes no sense to divide nature into better and worse species, or into beautiful and disgusting ones. The naked mole-rat, with its lack of fur; the tapeworm, which lives in the intestine; and the water lily, which cannot move, are all equally complete in their own right. Evolution does not judge; it tests. What survives is what is suited to that particular environment at that particular moment.
And this is the exhibition’s central message: you can see the evidence for yourself. Not read about it or see it on a screen, but stand face to face with 2,000 genuine objects which together show that all life is interconnected – and that you are part of the network. The evolution of life is not something that is over, or that only happens out in nature. It is happening inside you, right now.
