Luomus / Finnish Museum of Natural History

I'm not a huge fan of Natural History Museums. They seem to me a bit of a freak show. Unlike other museums which tend to have a specific educational or cultural objective, Natural History Museums seem more like the results of a great collecting game played before the invention of Panini football stickers or Pokemon Go. Inside you will generally find painstaking recreations of how animals looked just before they were hauled out of the sea or the sky or before they were shot suddenly through the head during a nice doze on the Serengeti.

   That said, kids love a Natural History Museum and the one in Helsinki has some dioramas so lifelike that they'll haunt your children's nightmares for many a year.

The ground floor is dedicated to bones. Here you can see how the world would look if we all had those x-ray specs found in comic strips in the 1980s. The impressive skeleton collection includes a huge sea-cow, a walrus, a terrifying collection of monkeys, some bones picked out of an owl poo and eagles which, stripped of their glorious plumage, and flesh, look like silly naked chickens.

The first floor has some truly impressive dioramas. Polar bears chasing seals under the plastic ice, lynx ignoring two easy to catch squirrels and leaping at a chickeny-thing up in a tree, lions fighting over a zebra, bears pulling apart a salmon like a child with a stringy toffee bar, and a very extensive collection of goats.

The second floor boasts a history of the earth confusingly presented in Finnish and Swedish and with the use of Christmas decorations to represent the earliest earthly elements (laminated English explanations are available). Here you can see life evolve away from it's weird early forms and into the cuddly dinosaurs we all recognise from The Land Before Time movies.

The top floor is a bit like an attic where they've thrown all the dusty old animals including a two headed cow (Who said freak show?). Personally I'd have put that cow inbetween two dioramas with one head popping into each.

Hit here for the museum webpage

Scroll down for pictures

Holy (sea) cow!

I got this from the Zebra exhibit