Science Saturdays

Science Saturdays are back at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on Saturday 2 January. It's a hands-on session for families, where you get to investigate real natural history specimens alongside the scientists who work with them. Rather than just looking at things behind glass, the whole point is to get stuck in and ask questions about the actual objects.

If you've never been, the museum is a Victorian Gothic building on Parks Road, and it's one of four university museums in the city, alongside the Ashmolean, the Museum of the History of Science and the Pitt Rivers. It opened in 1860 as the university's centre for scientific study and now holds more than 4.5 million zoological, entomological, geological, palaeontological and mineralogical specimens — the largest collection of its kind outside national museums. The central courtyard is covered by a glass roof held up by cast-iron columns wrought to look like tree branches, and each pillar is made from a different stone, forming a collection of the most important stones of the British Isles.

Among its best-known holdings are the Oxfordshire dinosaurs, a nearly complete dodo that inspired Lewis Carroll's bird in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a 45-foot T-rex and the swifts in the tower. It's a place where you can see a dodo and a T-rex in the same building, and Science Saturdays let you get closer to that kind of thing than a usual visit would.

Admission is free, and the museum is open daily from 10am to 5pm, so you can easily make a morning of it. Just keep in mind that while the museum is open, the specific Science Saturdays programme isn't confirmed for this edition yet, so it's worth checking in before you head over.