Museum Collection

People have been donating animal, plant and mineral specimens and ethonographic material to the Society for 200 years.

This is now an important and fascinating collection of over half a million items.  Many of these are on display to the public in the Great North Museum: Hancock but a great many more are held in a special storage facility nearby in Newcastle’s Discovery Museum, where they can be accessed by appointment for research purposes.

Click on the links below to find out more about some of our amazing items:

Great Auk (an extinct flightless bird)
Sparkie the famous budgerigar
Egyptology collections

The Society also owns a fantastic collection of rocks, minerals and fossils as part of its collections and you can explore some of this collection online, click here.

In the late 1950′s we could no longer afford to run and improve the Hancock Museum and our collection and so Newcastle University kindly agreed to lease these from us and they are now responsible for curating and caring for our collection.  Since the 1990′s they have contracted Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM) to carry out this work.  If you would like to donate any items to the museum collection or if you are interested in carrying out research please contact TWAM on 0191 222 6784 or email daniel.gordon@ncl.ac.uk