Heritage and Culture Warwickshire’s Natural History Collections

Owl butterfly, from the Manton Collection of entomology.

Cased kestrels from the Spicer taxidermy collection.

The collection is founded upon a historic collection of plant specimens, taxidermy, insects and shells, inherited from the 19th century collecting activities of the Warwickshire Natural History and Archaeological Society. Over the years these have been built up by many more acquisitions, principally of Warwickshire specimens. Today, we have a fine herbarium of about 40,000 specimens and a zoological collection of about 32 000 items including many mounted birds and mammals. The rest of the collection consists of invertebrates including pinned insects, donated by local entomologists.

Highlights include:

The Spicer collection of nineteenth-early twentieth century taxidermy.
First county records of plant species held within the herbarium.

The collections total about 16,000 specimens made up of approximately 10,000 fossils, 4,000 minerals, 1,000 rocks and a small number of man-made materials. All areas are slowly being added to.