The National Poo Museum was created by Daniel Roberts, Nigel George and Dave Badman from the Eccleston George collective of artists and social entrepreneurs on the Isle of Wight.

We launched “Poo at the Zoo” at Sandown, Isle of Wight on March 25 2016. It is a joint event with Isle of Wight Zoo. The attraction will be open to zoo visitors over the spring and summer period. After that the museum’s exhibition will go on tour.

Poo at the Zoo is the first phase of our development of the Poo Museum. It features an exhibition of twenty kinds of poo, encapsulated and displayed in illuminated resin spheres. These include elk, lion, human baby poo, a tawny owl pellet containing bones and teeth, 140 million year old fossil poo (coprolites) and a child’s shoe with a cat poo inside it.

We collected some poos from the wild in different countries. Some were also donated by Isle of Wight Zoo and Isle of Wight Dinosaur Museum. To prepare the faeces for encapsulation we built a special poo drying machine. A stick insect poo takes an hour or so to dessicate completely, but a lion poo can take a fortnight to dry!

The museum walls are lined with retro toilets and visitors can lift the lids and learn extraordinary poo-related facts.

Poo is all around us but we ignore it. The National Poo Museum’s mission is to lift the lid on the secret world of poo – to examine our relationship with it and to change forever the way we think about this amazing substance.

We also intend to rub people’s noses in important poo-related issues, from dog mess to the effects of diet on the microbiome, to lack of access to sanitation in developing countries.