See eye to eye with the animal kingdom in Tring at the Natural History Museum

Now open until November, a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Tring explores the weird and wonderful world of animal eyes.
The Natural History Museum in TringThe Natural History Museum in Tring
The Natural History Museum in Tring

Animal Vision creates spectacle and inspires wonder at the diversity of life, giving insight into how and why humans and other animals see the world differently.

The family exhibition is filled with light and colour and through hands-on activities and eye catching specimens, visitors will discover why vision can be fuzzy or focused, full of colour or shaded in grey.

Alongside an amazing range of animal eyeballs on display, from the alligator to anteater, penguin to python, games and activities newly developed for the exhibition will help visitors understand how eyes process light and allow us to experience colour.

Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017
Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017

Look a shark in the eye, find out whether a cheetah has bigger eyes than a puma and get up close to the eye of a viper.

Highlights of this free exhibition include the captivating and wonderfully diverse Eyeball Wall where visitors are challenged to test their own vision by getting eyeball to eyeball with the animal kingdom.

Alice Adams, interpretation and learning manager at the museum, said: “I’m most looking forward to seeing visitors checking out the Eyeball Wall and trying their spying skills in the Cunning Camouflage game.”

Other star attractions include a huge horseshoe crab, a deadly box jellyfish and a four eyed fish.

Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017
Animal Vision - Shark. Picture: Copyright The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 2017

Visitors can see for themselves the strange range of eyes in the animal kingdom, helping them to understand the diversity of life in the world.

This exhibition of shared discovery is expected to encourage children to see the world differently and question their own gaze.

The exhibition is open from 10am- 5pm Mondays to Saturdays and from 2-5pm on Sundays.

Entry is free.

The museum opened in the late 1800s to house the collections of Lionel Walter, second Lord Rothschild, and offers some outstanding examples of nineteenth century taxidermy.

The museum was bequeathed to the nation and became part of the Natural History Museum in 1938.

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