The Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum share one building on Parks Road (OX1 3PW), one front door and a free admission policy, so you can see both in a single afternoon without a ticket. You enter through the natural history museum's soaring glass-roofed court, walk past the dinosaur skeletons, and find the Pitt Rivers through an arched door at the back. Plan on two to three hours for both, and note one catch: the Pitt Rivers opens only at noon on most Mondays (checked October 2026).

Opening times, tickets and getting there

Both museums are free and do not issue tickets for individual visitors. The details differ slightly between the two, so check before you set out (checked October 2026):

  • Museum of Natural History. According to its visitor information page, it opens Monday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:45. It is closed on 24, 25 and 26 December. Groups of more than ten people visiting on the same day must book.
  • Pitt Rivers Museum. Its plan your visit page gives Tuesday to Sunday hours of 10:00 to 17:00. On Mondays it opens from 12:00 to 17:00, except on bank holiday Mondays and half-term holiday Mondays, when it opens at 10:00. Booking is required for all group visits.

The Pitt Rivers estimates the walk from Carfax Tower at about 15 minutes (0.6 miles), and from Oxford railway station at about 20 minutes. The nearest bus stops are on South Parks Road, on Banbury Road near the Keble Road junction, and on Magdalen Street. Drivers should be aware that Oxford's traffic filters are now in operation and that driving through one without a permit or exemption during operating hours incurs a fine; the museums encourage visitors to use one of the five Park and Ride sites instead. There are bike racks on the corner of South Parks Road and Parks Road.

Inside the Museum of Natural History

The University Museum, as it was first called, opened in 1860 after five years of construction. It was built to draw scientific study at the university under one roof, and the museum's own history notes that it remains a working centre of research and fieldwork as well as a public museum.

Start in the main court. Suspended from the roof is a group of five skeletons that includes a killer whale, a beluga whale and a bottlenose dolphin, and the museum highlights page lists several other must-sees close by:

  • Megalosaurus. The collection holds Megalosaurus bucklandii, the world's first scientifically described dinosaur.
  • Out of the Deep. Two large plesiosaur skeletons, marine reptiles from Jurassic seas around 165 million years ago in what is now Britain.
  • The trilobite wall. Fossils of 450-million-year-old trilobites from Morocco.
  • The Nantan meteorite. A nickel-iron meteorite which the museum describes as the oldest thing you can see and touch in the building. The touchable minerals have also returned to the main court on new plinths.
  • Gemstones and the Red Lady of Paviland. The gem displays sit alongside the story of the oldest human remains found in the UK.

The most famous object is the Oxford Dodo. It came from the Tradescant collection, one of the founding collections of the Ashmolean, and first appears in a 1656 catalogue as "Dodar, from the Island Mauritius; it is not able to flie, being so big". What survives is the skull with skin on its left side, the sclerotic ring from the eye, the skeleton of a foot, a sectioned femur and a feather: the only dodo soft tissue left anywhere in the world. A cast of the skull is on permanent display, and a model of a composite dodo skeleton stands in the upper galleries.

A free audio guide covers 15 highlights in nine languages, including Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese and Urdu, via the museum's website.

The building and the Great Debate

The building is a work of art in its own right. Architects Deane and Woodward won a university competition for the design, and its neo-Gothic style was strongly influenced by the critic John Ruskin and his Pre-Raphaelite circle. The museum's architecture page explains that the first version of the iron and glass roof could not support its own weight and had to be taken down before completion. The second version introduced the cast iron columns still standing today, with wrought ironwork branches modelled on sycamore, walnut and palm.

Look closely at the arcades around the court. There are 126 columns, each cut from a different British decorative stone and labelled with its name and source, and the carved capitals represent the botanical orders, often worked from live plants brought from the Botanic Garden. Nineteen statues of scientists, from Aristotle and Galileo to Newton and Darwin, stand against the pillars. In 2010 the museum added its first new bust for more than a century: the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who did ground-breaking crystallography research in the building and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

The building was barely finished when it hosted one of the best-known arguments in the history of science. On 30 June 1860, at the British Association meeting marking the opening, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the biologist Thomas Huxley clashed over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in front of almost 500 people. The museum's account of the Great Debate records that the room where it happened, now the Huxley Room, holds an estimated one million pinned specimens used by researchers worldwide.

Inside the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers is the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and archaeology. According to the museum's about page, it holds more than 500,000 objects, photographs and manuscripts from all over the world and from all periods of human existence. Objects are arranged by type, a "democracy of things", rather than by region or period, so you will find musical instruments, weapons, masks, textiles, jewellery and tools from many cultures displayed side by side.

The museum is open about the fact that its popular image as a "museum of a museum" is misleading: none of the original displays survive, and the galleries have been changed and updated throughout their history. The dense, crowded cases are deliberate, because a large share of the collection is on view.

Some practical tips for the galleries:

  • Read the small labels. The museum's history page explains that the early handwritten labels are kept for what they reveal about the first curators. Numbers such as 1932.5.62 record the year an object arrived, the collection it came with and its place in that collection, not the date it was made.
  • Expect context about difficult history. The Labelling Matters project reviewed the main galleries, and display interventions installed in 2020 draw attention to derogatory language on older labels and to the museum's colonial past.
  • Look for the current displays. The exhibitions and displays page lists the With These Hands display and gallery trail on the first floor, co-produced with MultakaOxford volunteers, a display on the Kingdom of Benin on the first floor lower gallery, and an Evenki cosmology display (checked October 2026).

History and changing displays at the Pitt Rivers

The museum was founded in 1884, when General Pitt-Rivers gave his collection to the university. Born Augustus Henry Lane Fox in Yorkshire in 1827, he served as an army officer, retired in 1882 with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-General, and inherited the Pitt-Rivers name and estate from a great-uncle in 1880. In 1882 he became the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and he died in 1900. His gift came with conditions: the university had to build a museum to house the collection, appoint a lecturer to teach about it and keep the general mode of display. The museum first opened to visitors in 1887 and was fully open by 1892. Most of his objects, the museum notes, came from dealers, auction houses and fellow members of the Anthropological Institute rather than from his own travels.

Older guidebooks often single out the shrunken heads. They are no longer on show. The museum's page on the tsantsa explains that they were removed from public display in 2020 because the old "Treatment of Dead Enemies" case led visitors to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture, and that the museum now works with Shuar partners. Research by Dr Laura Van Broekhoven found ten tsantsa in the collection, six human, two sloth and two monkey, acquired between 1884 and 1936. The wider policy on ancestral remains, including repatriation, is set out on the museum's website, which links its human remains records to the online collections database.

Despite its reputation as a fixed Victorian display, the Pitt Rivers does run special exhibitions, and a new one is announced for November 2026. Until 6 December 2026, Saad Qureshi's Geography of the Mind is on the ground floor as part of the On Paradise trail linked to his exhibition at the Schwarzman Centre (checked October 2026).

Current exhibitions at the Museum of Natural History

The main exhibition until 13 April 2027 is 34: The critical raw materials shaping our future, which opened on 17 June 2026. Developed with researchers from the Oxford EARTH Programme and other university departments, it takes its title from the 34 raw materials on the UK government's critical list, from lithium and cobalt to the rare earth elements, and asks where they come from and how they might be recycled.

Smaller displays change more often. The Geology of Star Trek presenting case, marking the franchise's 60th anniversary, runs from 7 September to 8 November 2026, and the community case Oxford: Then, Now, Future, made by students on the museum's Natural Science and Heritage Scheme, runs until 6 November 2026. A small Saad Qureshi sculpture, Abaabil, stands in the main court as the natural history museum's stop on the On Paradise trail (checked October 2026).

Food, families and accessibility

Neither gallery allows food or drink. The museum café page lists Taylors inside the natural history museum, serving hot lunches, salads and sandwiches daily from 10:00 to 16:30, and the Horsebox Coffee Co. on the front lawn for cakes and drinks. There is no café inside the Pitt Rivers, and you are welcome to picnic on the lawn.

For families, the Pitt Rivers families page lists free trails at the information desk, many suitable for under-fives, along with baby-changing facilities on the ground floor. Buggies are welcome and every floor is reachable by lift, but there are no cloakroom facilities, so travel light. Both museums publish regular family events on their what's on pages.

On access:

  • The natural history museum has a step-free accessible entrance down the path on the right-hand side of the building as you face it from Parks Road, leading to a lift to all floors. Its accessibility page also describes two on-site Blue Badge spaces, available first come, first served.
  • The Pitt Rivers has a platform lift at its entrance from the natural history museum, level access through its South Entrance on Robinson Close, a lift to all floors, seven unisex toilets on the ground floor and an Easy Read guide, according to its access page. Assistance animals are welcome, but pets are not, because insects they carry can damage organic collections. The museum also holds relaxed morning openings for families with autistic members.
  • Photography for personal use is welcome at the Pitt Rivers, but tripods need the museum's written permission.

Evenings and other university museums nearby

The Pitt Rivers runs Late Nights, after-hours evenings with music, talks and workshops. Some are joint events with the natural history museum, while for evenings exclusive to the Pitt Rivers, entry is through the South Entrance on Robinson Close. Recent examples include A Century of Sounds: Live on 27 February 2026. Pitt Rivers membership, which comes with members' events and shop discounts, starts at £36.

Both museums belong to the university's Gardens, Libraries and Museums group. Two of its other venues are a short walk away and also free. The History of Science Museum on Broad Street, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm, displays scientific instruments and Einstein's Blackboard. The Ashmolean on Beaumont Street, the university's museum of art and archaeology, is open every day. For more ideas on spending time in the city, see the Oxford Society homepage.