Novosibirsk State Museum of Local History

Housed in a handsome former trading building on the central square of Novosibirsk, this regional museum surveys the natural history, ethnography and settlement of the Ob River basin and wider Siberia. Its collections range from indigenous artefacts and archaeological finds to displays on the growth of the city around the railway. A celebrated highlight is a mounted mammoth skeleton, a reminder of the region's ice-age fauna. The early-twentieth-century commercial hall is itself an architectural landmark on Krasny Prospekt.