National Zoological Museum of China is located in Beijing, the capital city of China. Founded in July 2009, it is the largest zoological museum in Asia. Before the formal opening, it took scientists 10 years to collect, make and sort specimens of all kinds of animals.
The museum covers an area of 7300 square meters, with 3 floors and construction style like National Museum of Natural History in France. Its exhibition is divided into 3 big parts, birds, insects and African wild animals.
In invertebrates hall from the northern area, there displays some spiders and small marine animals like starfish, anemones, corals and others. They have a pink starfish that I like very much, looks very pretty. The southern hall is an exhibition for commemorating the 190th birthday anniversary of Darwin, tourists can learn a lot useful information about animals, natures and evolution from there.
Everyone is amazed by those lifelike specimens from different animals. It feels like you are in a natural zoo, only safer. You don’t have to worry about some of those might bite you out of no where. In birds hall, you really have to admire all the efforts that staff put in the museum. More than 100 specimen of birds are lined according different kinds and size, What a spectacular scene! And all those birds only belong to the a small group of aves. I can’t help wondering how many birds there are on the planet, I wish one day I could do some birds watching like they did in that Hollywood movie-The Big Year.
For most visitors, only providing the animal names in different languages is far from enough. The point is you have to make visitor get something meaningful from those specimens. No doubt the museum has done a great job on this.
What impresses me the most is a picture about the flight height of different birds. The flying champion in birds kingdom is a bird called bar-headed goose, their average flying height is about 6000-9000 meters. So it is no trouble to fly over summit of Everest, sometime it might hit a plane.
Vertebrates, birds and insects take up an important part in the museum, so does colorful butterfly. I would have never known there are so many different kinds of butterflies if I wasn’t here. They have a place called Butterfly valley with some high-tech and sound effect, making you feel like you are in some deep forests with those bright-colored butterflies.
However, the joy of seeing those lovely animals soon was replaced by shock and worrying. A data board dragged my attention. Of all the vertebrates with records, zoologists only assess one third of them, and one fifth of which are endangered species.
When it comes to amphibians, reptiles, fish and invertebrates, the situation is way worse. It is hard to imagine some of those lovely creatures might be disappearing from earth some day. Everyone really should take some small steps and protect those endangered species.