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Canterbury Museum Review

Read our Christchurch and Canterbury sights reviews. Or post your own.

Canterbury Museum

  • Address: Rolleston Ave., Christchurch
  • Phone: 03/366-5000

Fodor's Review:

When this museum was founded in 1867, its trading power with national and international museums was in moa bones. These Jurassic birds roamed the plains of Canterbury and are believed to have been hunted to extinction by early Maori. The museum still houses one of the largest collections of artifacts from the moa hunting period. You'll also find a reconstruction of an early Christchurch streetscape and a natural-history discovery center where kids get to handle bones and fossils. The Hall of Antarctic Discovery charts the links between the city and Antarctica, from the days when Captain Cook's ship skirted the continent in a small wooden ship. Among the 20th-century explorers celebrated here are the Norwegian Roald Admundsen, who was first to visit the South Pole, and Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died on his way back from the continent. (Follow local tradition and rub the nose of the bronze sculpture of Scott's head for good luck.) Several vehicles, from a dogsled to a bright-orange Tucker snowcat, trace the methods of transport on the ice. There's a café on-site with a nice outlook over the Botanic Gardens if you plan to stay a while.

  • Cost: Donation requested; Discovery exhibition $2
  • Open: Oct.-Mar., daily 9-5:30; Apr.-Sept., daily 9-5

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