Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museums app

The complete collection at the Booth Museum comprises over 600,000 biological and 50,000 geological specimens. In addition there are over 5,000 microscopic slides, 12,000 books, journals and periodicals dating back three centuries, and thousands of site records. Almost a thousand of the specimens have been published in scientific journals, and include many ‘type’ specimens (specimens used in the original description of a species).

The predominant collections include the following.

Insects

Over half a million specimens make up the collection of butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, dragonflies, bees etc. This includes over 650 internationally important butterfly ‘types’. The museum's current display of butterflies (only a tiny proportion of the 20,000 different species held), stems from a popular temporary exhibition mounted jointly with the Royal Pavilion in 1937.

Molluscs (represented by shells)

This collection of 60,000 marine, land and freshwater shells ranges from the British Isles to the Oceanic Islands and the Far East.

Vertebrates

Brighton solicitor Frederick Lucas (1842–1932) assembled a comprehensive collection of skeletons, which now forms the bulk of this 80,000 strong collection of amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals. Non-skeletal material is represented by mounted vertebrates, skins, and over 60,000 birds’ eggs. The displays include a killer whale stranded on Hove Beach in 1935, the skull of an elephant who died at London Zoo in 1980, and Lucas’s own Irish deerhound ‘Wolf’ and Pomeranian ‘Saucy Bill’.

Plants

There are over 60,000 examples of algae, mosses, liverworts, lichens, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. Of historical note is the significant collection from St Petersburg made by Sir A Crichton, physician to the Russian Tsar circa 1795.

Geological

Among the 55,000 geological specimens, Henry Willett’s 1860 bequest of chalk fossils remains one of the collection’s cornerstones. The museum's display includes fossils, minerals, 350 million-year-old corals, shells from a 55 million-year-old ‘Mediterranean’ lagoon near Newhaven, and the 140 million-year-old bones of dinosaurs that once wandered the Sussex Weald.

Other collections

Other smaller but significant collections include over 4,000 bryozoans (sea-mats), slime moulds, crustaceans, echinoderms, sponges, hydroids and bacteria. Many of these are slide mounts.