成人快手

Wooden crates, cardboard boxes and bits in bubble wrap fill the floors of Exeter's Ark.

Behind its locked doors lie nearly 1.5 million objects.

While the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Queen Street is closed for a 拢15m restoration and redevelopment, most of its collections are stored in the Ark.

Stuffed animals of all shapes, sizes, and species sit alongside sedan chairs, bicycles, weapons and bones.

"This is the main storage facility for all of the museum's collections," said conservator Alison Hopper Bishop.

A Kents Cavern bone under the microscope

"Everything for the new museum is stored here as well as objects for temporary exhibitions and loans."

The Ark also houses two temporary conservation laboratories, where the museum's team of conservators prepare and preserve objects for display in the refurbished museum.

This new museum store is a purpose-built temporary home for the varied collections.

Alison said: "Finally we know that the conditions they are in here will ensure they are preserved for longer.

"The museum itself is very old and was never designed to store the huge collections that were amassed over the years.

"We had to use all corners of the museum to store items. The environmental conditions were poor.

Victorian bicycles in the Ark

"Here, we've been able to design the building with the best possible conditions for the wide variety of collections that are here. Now we can keep them stable."

The Ark was built by Devon-based ecological design architects Gale and Snowden.

"The overarching principle for this store was that it should be sustainable,听 environmentally sound, with low energy use. We also want the building to be a stable environment to protect these objects."

In the Ark's conservation labs, bones from Kents Cavern have soil delicately scraped from their surfaces and a Jurassic ichthyosaurus (fossil fish) is put back together again.

The ichthyosaurus is 200-250,000 years old. The joins of the 91kg fossil fish had separated over the years so conservators have been working to literally put it back together again.

Like many other objects of the Ark, it will be redisplayed when the museum reopens its doors after the 拢15m redevelopment.

Textiles and costumes from Rougemont House will also be housed in the Ark of animals and objects.

The Royal Albert Memorial Museum is scheduled to reopen with the collections of the Ark in 2010.