Children visiting Whanganui Museum had a rare experience yesterday when they were taken on a tour of the natural history collection.
Dr Mike Dickison led a group of school children and their parents on a guided journey to look at rarely seen objects stored in the museum's basement.
"Let me show you this exhibit from our spirit collection," said Dr Dickison as he produced a jar of pickled snakes from a refrigerator. The tangle of small, exotic serpents has been stored in the basement for a very long time and museum staff will eventually go through all the collection and improve preservation and labelling.
Another item in the spirit collection (species stored in preserving liquid) is a large kokopu fished out of the Kaitoke Stream around 50 years ago.
"It is one of the five species of whitebait and they never grow this big now, so this is a really important specimen because without it we wouldn't know they ever grew so large," Dr Dickison said.