It’s back-to-back for my museum visit for the weekend. You may have already noticed in my previous post that I went to visit the National Museum of Singapore yesterday. Today, I immediately jumped onto my 5th museum for the year; Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. It is Singapore’s only natural history museum and it is located in the vicinity of the National University of Singapore.
The museum is named after Lee Kong Chian, a prominent Chinese businessman and philanthropist active in Malaya and Singapore between the 1930s and the 1960s. The museum opened in April 2015 and has over 2000 natural history specimens on display. Getting to the museum from my home is a bit far though; it took me over an hour by public bus.
The museum has 2 levels. Although it is not very huge, but it does contain a lot of interesting specimens/displays and I surprisingly spent 2 hours in there. When I first entered the museum, I thought it would need me only 1 hour to explore the whole place. The main highlight of the museum is of course the three gigantic dinosaur fossils at the centre. The fossils belong to diplodocid sauropod species (herbivore dinosaur with long neck and tail) and they were found between 2007 and 2010 in the United States.
Didn’t know there are dinosaur fossil exhibits here in Singapore up until today. I think not many people (including Singaporeans) know that too. Jurassic Park vibe coming in….haha. Besides than that, the museum also features specimens of sperm whale, megalodon, crocodile, leatherback turtle, Sunda pangolin, Japanese spider crab, etc (not to mention that there are a lot of specimens of various insects, mammals, fungi, arthropods, reptiles, etc too).
By the way, admission to this museum is not free even for Singaporeans/PR. It costs SGD18 for adult Singapore residents and SGD27 for adult foreigner. That’s quite a high price tag actually.
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