The Mammals Gallery
In the Mammals Gallery you can explore the rich diversity of mammals living on land, from the enormous African elephant to the diminutive pygmy shrew.
In the mammals gallery at the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History mammals from all corners of the globe can be found. At first sight the placement of animals may seem to be a bit haphazard. Taking a closer look, you will notice, however, that they have been placed in groups, so that apes are in one group, predators in another and hoofed animals in yet another cluster. This is why it is not so strange that you can see a reindeer from Svalbard next to a Chinese water deer.
A fascinating experience
Mammals have been around on our earth for 200 million years, but they came into their own only after the extinction of the large dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Many of the mammal families which you can see at the museum appeared at that time, for example, apes, predators and elephants.
In the mammals gallery you can study these animals at close range. You can stand next to the elephant and see how big an adult African elephant really is, and compare it with Sweden’s largest animal – the moose. If you look around carefully, you may perhaps find a pygmy shrew. It is so tiny that one would need two million pygmy shrews to match the weight of a five-ton elephant!
