Wakefield Museum

The Wakefield Museum, on Wood Street near the town hall, is the local-history collection for the city. Most of it covers what you would expect — Roman finds, medieval pottery, the textile and coal-mining trades that built the town — but the small Charles Waterton room at the back is what makes it worth the trip.

Waterton (1782–1865) was a Wakefield squire, naturalist, and eccentric who spent his fortune turning his estate into the world's first wildlife reserve and brought back from the Amazon a remarkable collection of stuffed birds and mammals using preservation techniques he himself invented. The Caiman God on display in the museum, with its uneasy human features, is one of his most discussed pieces.

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A story
The strangest item in the collection is a stuffed crocodilian — the so-called 'Amazonian Caiman God' — collected on a nineteenth-century expedition up the Amazon by the Wakefield naturalist Charles Waterton. Waterton stuffed it himself using a technique he had invented and then dressed it in human clothes to display a satirical point about politicians; it has been on show in some form ever since.

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