Museum renovating Animal Attic

Several wolves, a polar bear, a big Japanese spider crab, and many other creatures will soon have fewer young admirers peering into their Otago Museum glass cases.

The museum's Victorian-inspired Animal Attic gallery will be closed from next Monday until Friday, June 16 for museum staff to carry out several conservation tasks.

The reopened gallery would look the same, but ''important improvements'' would be made, ''both to the building itself and the specimens on display'', a museum spokesman said.

Aimed at reducing deterioration or loss to collections, the preventive work will include maintenance of the gallery's historic cases, improvements to seals on skylights and doors, and a thorough, gallery-wide clean.

''Preventative conservation is an important aspect of caring for a collection as historically important and diverse as ours,'' museum conservation manager Nyssa Mildwaters said.