Overview of our Sciences Collections
Sciences
The Museum’s science collection comprises mostly of photographs and documents relating to the history of Andrew Carnegie’s steel industries in America, the Carnegie-funded 60-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory and the establishment of the Carnegie Institution for Science. The collection also contains some original artefacts such as early photographic equipment, a Line of Position computer and life-ring from the non-magnetic research vessel 'Carnegie' (1909-1929), a section of Carnegie steel rail rolled at the Edgar Thomson Steel Mill and a section of early T-shaped rail, the first ever to be manufactured at the mills of Sir John Guest in Wales (1831).
Natural History
Comprising of a small collection of zoology, mineralogy and palaeontology specimens, the star items of this collection relate to the history of Diplodocus carnegii (or ‘Dippy’) dinosaur, the excavation of which was funded by Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s. This collection includes photographs, original prints and scale models of the dinosaur, slides from the Dinosaur Hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, a dinosaur egg fossil and a fibreglass copy of the skull of Diplodocus carnegii.
