Natural History Museum Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, NIGERIA

The founders of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, NIGERIA had desires for a world-class museum tailored after the models of British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. It started in 1971 as a museum of the Department of Biological Sciences of the University. The activity of the Natural History Museum is grouped into six main areas of Administration, Research, Collection, Cataloguing, Exhibition and Training. The Museum serves as an important ex-situ conservation facility on Nigeria's biodiversity resources: specimens in the Museum collection include a number of bequeaths. The Museum herbarium has about twenty-thousand (20,000) fully identified plants and five thousand one hundred and fifty (5, 150) bird varieties and a sizeable study collection of mammal skins and skulls from various localities across Nigeria; there are insects collections and over six thousand (6,000) archaeological artifacts. The vision of the founders of Natural History Museum is that it should house all Type-specimen collected in science research faculties of the University.