Shanghai Natural History Museum's New Building to Open Next June

And the managers of the city’s Natural History Museum say their new building will open to the public next June, some four months ahead of schedule. ICS reporter Zhang Jun tells us how the museum is preparing for its biggest move in nearly 5 decades.

These dinosaur fossils are the last batch of hundreds of exhibits that researchers are packing before moving them to the new museum early next year. To ensure a smooth transition, researchers say they began making preparations over the summer while keeping the old museum near the Bund open to the public. They say the work is not as easy as a normal relocation.

Di Yeli, Engineer, Shanghai Natural History Museum, said, "To insure the integrity of exhibits, for example, since an entire dinosaur fossil consists of nearly 100 smaller bone fossils, we must put a number on each one so that they can be efficiently reassembled later. We also use some special plastic to fasten the fossils because they are very fragile."

Museum officials say they will have to finish building the new museum by the year’s end so that the relocation and interior decoration will be done on time. They say the new museum next to the Jing’an Sculpture Park will be much bigger and have more exhibits.

Xu Xiaohong, Project Chief, Shanghai Science & Technology Museum, said, "The old museum is not comparable to the new one. The old one only has 8,000 square meters while the new one, with plenty of parking lots, will have a floor area of 45,000 square meters."

But officials say the bigger facility doesn’t come cheap, with the construction alone costing some 780 million yuan. Work began in September of 2009 and was suspended for about six months during the 2010 World Expo.

The new museum is shaped like a nautilus -- a kind of shellfish that has been around for millions of years -- long before human beings. But while the building’s framework is done, museum designers say they are still working on how to display the old exhibits in a different way.