The Booth Museum of Natural History is the natural history museum in the city of Brighton, England. The museum specializes in Victorian taxidermy, especially for birds, fossils, insects, skeletons, and bones. The museum is part of the "Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove" group. The Booth Museum opened in 1874: its founder was the naturalist and collector Edward Thomas Booth from whom the museum takes its name. Booth, as an avid ornithologist, had the desire to collect examples of all the bird species present in Great Britain: for each of them he included a male, a female, a juvenile and any variation of the plumage (dioramas). The Booth Museum was the first to present a collection in this way in Britain and it has since inspired the way other museums have presented animal species in their exhibits. Booth donated the museum to the city in 1890 as long as the display of over 300 dioramas was not modified. The museum was opened in 1891 and has been a Natural History Museum since 1971.
Today it houses British bird dioramas along with collections of butterflies, British fossils and animal bones. Thanks to the expansion of the collection, today it has about 525,000 insects, 50,000 minerals and rocks, 30,000 plants and 5,000 microscopic slides.
In 2020, a hitherto unknown species of pterosaur was discovered in the museum's collection of fossils. However, the museum's flagship remains the collection of stuffed birds which is also one of the largest in the country. The museum also houses some skeletons of mammal species, such as primates, whales and extinct species (dodo and woolly rhinoceros), fossils and minerals, 650 types of butterflies.