You walk in, and the first thing you do is look up. The Grande Galerie de l’Évolution is a single nave three floors high, ringed by three galleries and roofed with a thousand square metres of glass, built in iron and glass in 1889. The architecture is that of the railway stations of the same season; the effect, with the animals lined up on the floor, is that of an ark.
The ticket here has a rule of its own, and you should know it before you plan the day: the Paris Museum Pass is not valid, because the gallery belongs to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and not to the national museums, exactly like the Musée de l’Homme. And the closing day is not the one you expect: it closes on Tuesdays, not on Mondays like almost everything else in Paris.
Why should a museum of stuffed animals interest someone who travels for art?
Let’s begin!
1. Four hundred years, and a reopening that changed everything
In 2026 the Muséum turns four hundred. It counts them from an edict of Louis XIII of 6 January 1626, which set up a Jardin royal des plantes médicinales; the land arrived in 1633, the founding text in 1635, the inauguration in 1640. In the eighteenth century the comte de Buffon was its intendant for nearly fifty years and filled it with the collections brought back by the expeditions.
The room around you, though, has a much closer date: 1994. It used to be called the Galerie de Zoologie and it had stayed shut for decades; Borja Huidobro, Paul Chemetov and René Allio reopened it by overturning the principle of the display. No more cases ordered by species, but groups of animals staged together, the way you would meet them. From 2014 the gallery gained light and sound: a day on the savannah from dawn to dusk, with a storm that arrives halfway through and passes.
2. The floor of the sea, where you hear nothing
What does it feel like to walk into a museum and find yourself underwater?
The ground floor is the sea, and it is dark. Three marine mammal skeletons greet you: a southern right whale, a blue whale and a sperm whale. Further on is Wheke, the giant squid, with its tentacles spread. Around you the shoals of tuna and mackerel hang as though they were swimming, and a basking shark passes among them.
The rest of the level insists on differences: how a coral reef is built, how the species of the shore live to the rhythm of the tides, how life manages in the deeps where no light reaches. It is the part of the museum children cross most slowly, and it is worth not pulling them along.
3. The caravane africaine, the image everybody has in mind
Go up a floor and you find the scene you know even if you have never been here: a long line of savannah animals crossing the nave, with the elephant at the head. Behind him come a hippopotamus, two rhinoceroses, buffaloes, hartebeests, wildebeests, zebras and three giraffes of decreasing height, and along the sides walk hyenas, wild dogs, lions and cheetahs.
It is not a decorative parade, it is an exercise. Predators and prey are arranged so that you can try to work out who eats whom, and if you look at the distances between the groups you will see they are the right ones. Stop on the light as well, because it changes while you look: the cycle of the day lasts a few minutes and goes over you without your noticing.
4. The tropical forest, read vertically
Straight after the savannah the route changes continent and changes shape. To tell the story of South America they have built a tall metal structure that reproduces the storeys of the tropical forest, and the animals are set at the heights where they really live.
Low down you find the tapir, the anteater, the armadillo, the anaconda and the jaguar. Higher up, in the canopy, are the sloth, the blue macaw and the margay. It is the quickest way to grasp something documentaries take half an hour to explain: in an equatorial forest you do not live in a place, you live at a height.
The level ends on a comparison that looks like a provocation and is in fact a lesson: on one side the Sahara, with dromedary, gazelle and fennec fox, on the other the Arctic and the Antarctic, with polar bear, emperor penguin and harp seal. Opposite conditions, same problem.
5. The elephant and the tiger of the duc d’Orléans
Go up to the first-floor gallery, and what you gain is a point of view: you find yourself at the height of the giraffes’ heads, which from below you saw only foreshortened.
Then a group stops you: a tiger clinging to the flank of a female elephant, and the elephant bent under that grip. It is the reconstruction of a hunting accident of 1888. Philippe d’Orléans is posted in the howdah the elephant carries on its back, hunting tigers; a female defending her cubs throws herself at the elephant, seizes the wall of the howdah with her claws and brings it down. Years later the duke had the group made by an English workshop, and it is one of the greatest monuments of Victorian taxidermy. He left it to the Muséum together with his whole collection in 1926.
The museum presents it without disowning the age it comes from, and it is right to: it is a scientific object and a monument to the memory of a hunt at once, and the two do not come apart.
6. The room of threatened and vanished species
On the second level the route becomes an argument about evolution, with Lamarck, Darwin and Mendel, genetics and classification. Then you enter a long narrow room, with a white vault and a herringbone floor, quieter than all the rest: it is the one that stays with you.
There is the giant panda described and shipped to Paris by father David in the nineteenth century, and it is no ordinary panda: together with another specimen of the Muséum it makes up the type series of Ailuropoda melanoleuca, the reference on which world science defined the species.
There is the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial that looked like a wolf and no longer exists, next to the Sumatran one, which can still be saved.
And there is the Cape lion, Panthera leo melanochaita, with the black mane that ran down over its shoulders and its belly. That mane is exactly what condemned it: the animal reached 250 kilos and three metres in length, and it was too desirable a trophy. The last wild one is said to have been killed in 1858, and the last specimen to have died in captivity around 1865. Of the only individual photographed alive we know that it lived at the Ménagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in 1860, in the very garden you are walking through.
7. The staircases, and the twenty-seven busts forgotten in a cellar
How do you forget twenty-seven sculptures for seventy years?
This is the part almost everybody skips, and until a few years ago you could not even reach it. In the days of the Galerie de Zoologie the two monumental staircases carried visitors up from the esplanade of the Jardin des Plantes. Today you can walk them, and they are full of statues.
There is Buffon, in marble, carved by Augustin Pajou on a commission from the crown while the intendant was still alive: a very rare tribute, and the Latin inscription says so, MAJESTATI NATURAE PAR INGENIUM, the majesty of Nature matched by the genius of man. He is shown as an ancient philosopher, draped, with one foot on nature and his hand resting on the globe he is writing on. There is Guy de la Brosse, the doctor who had founded the garden.
And then there are twenty-seven busts of naturalists, ordered by the State at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the start of the Great War they were put out of harm’s way in a cellar of the Galerie de Zoologie, and there they stayed forgotten until the works of 1990. When they were found again they were nameless: they have been restored, identified one by one and spread along the two flights. If you stop to read the names, you are reading a list somebody had to rebuild.
Practical information
Details checked on 26 September 2026 on the official site mnhn.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The permanent collection costs 13 euros full price and 10 reduced. With the temporary exhibition the ticket rises to 16 and 13, and there is a family rate of 52 euros for two adults and two young people between 3 and 25. The Sur les traces des dinosaures route, which occupies the Petite Galerie space on the first floor, costs 14 and 11 and includes the permanent collection. Free admission. Entry is free for young people under 25, whether they live in the European Union or outside it, on production of a document. The museum writes “moins de 25 ans révolus”, so if you are exactly 25 ask at the desk. Entry is free as well for disabled visitors and their companion, for jobseekers, for teachers preparing a visit and for journalists. Opening hours. The gallery opens Wednesday to Monday, from 10:00 to 18:00. The desks close an hour earlier. Closing days. It closes on Tuesdays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Attention: the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée, which stands in the same garden and is the one with the dinosaur skeletons in a row, is closed for works. Do not confuse the two: they are two different buildings and two different tickets. Paris Museum Pass. The gallery is not included in the pass, because it belongs to the Muséum. Getting there. The entrance is at 36 rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. The stops are Gare d’Austerlitz on lines 5 and 10 and on the RER C, Censier-Daubenton on line 7 and Jussieu on line 10. How long it takes. You walk the gallery in two hours. With children allow three, and bear in mind that the Jardin des Plantes around it is free.
The exhibitions on at the gallery, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The other museum of the Muséum that is worth the trip is the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro, which covers prehistory and anthropology and shares this gallery’s rule about the pass. Staying in the fifth arrondissement, ten minutes on foot bring you to the Institut du monde arabe on the riverside and to the Musée Curie behind the Panthéon. And if what you like is nineteenth-century iron and glass architecture, the Musée d’Orsay is the same idea applied to a station. Audubon’s plates, which draw the birds of America at life size, are at the musée de la BnF, on the Richelieu site.
Photo credits: facade by Teodora (CC BY-SA 3.0); whale skeleton by Thesupermat (CC BY-SA 3.0); giraffes by Dinkum (CC0); caravane africaine and room of threatened species in the public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.
