HOMING: the biodiversity hall and its fossils
Exhibition current form 2020s; specimens and fossils of various dates
Floor four is the quietest of the permanent floors and the one with the most real things in it. The exhibition is called HOMING, finding home, and it asks where the animals and plants of Taiwan live, what they need and what happens when the places they depend on change. Around the walls are mounted specimens, from a brown bear and a grey wolf to a hornbill and the tiny leopard cat of Taiwan's lowlands, some of them road casualties turned into teaching material, together with skeletons, skulls and pressed plants from the centre's collection. In the middle are cases of fossils, and among them is a small marine reptile from the Triassic, a Keichousaurus, curled on a slab of grey limestone with every rib and toe bone visible.
Keichousaurus lived about two hundred and forty million years ago in shallow seas over what is now Guizhou in southern China, and its fossils are common enough there that complete skeletons like this one reach museums around the world. Look at the long neck and the paddle like limbs, which show it swam, and at the fine ribs, thickened to act as ballast. Nearby are dinosaur eggs, sea urchins and antlers of the deer called the four unlikes, and each is labelled with the question of what its animal needed in order to live.
The hall balances the noisy interactive floors above. It is where the centre keeps the natural history collection it has built up since the nineteen fifties, when it was as much a museum of specimens as a place for experiments, and it is the floor on which parents most often find themselves reading while their children run ahead. Look also for the children's environmental play area at one end and for the displays on Taiwan's endemic species, of which the island has an unusual number for its size.
Did You Know? Some of the mounted animals in the hall are road casualties, including a Taiwanese leopard cat, prepared so that the species can be studied and protected.
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