Australian Museum

The Australian Museum, originally known as the Colonial Museum and Sydney Museum, is a state public museum in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is operated and funded as a cultural institution by the state government of New South Wales.

With its predecessor originated in 1827, the museum is the oldest natural history museum in Australia and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the world. It was first conceived and developed along the contemporary European model of an encyclopedic warehouse of cultural and natural history, and features collections of vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, as well as mineralogy, palaeontology and anthropology. The scientific stature of the museum was established under the curatorship of scientist Gerard Krefft in the 1860s.