Museu Blau – Museu de Ciències Naturals de BarcelonaDiagonal Mar / Parc del Fòrum

Invisible Animals

Now showing17 May 2025 – 10 January 2027€6.50

Myth, life, extinction, de-extinction: animals we rarely see, from legendary beasts and extinct species to little-known living ones vital to healthy ecosystems.

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On now All of October 2026

A 20-metre giant squid meets you at the entrance, and it's made from organic waste. So are the 70-odd wall panels, coloured with turmeric, coffee and charcoal and laser-etched instead of printed. When the show closes it all gets melted down or composted, and the museum plans to grow tomatoes with it for the animals of future exhibitions.

Viggo Mortensen opens it on screen, in Catalan, Spanish or English. Then come four semi-enclosed rooms: Myth, Life, Extinction and De-extinction. Museum fossils, skeletons and replicas sit beside work by about thirty artists, including Joan Fontcuberta and Antoni Muntadas. You go from the Chupacabras, a legend born in Puerto Rico in 1992, to the Montseny brook newt, Catalonia's only endemic vertebrate.

Kids get a reading corner and a build-your-own-dinosaur game, and the trail continues into the permanent Planet Life galleries, where 12 related animals are flagged. Tickets are €6.50, or €10.50 with Planet Life, and under-16s go free.

Look for

The giant squid
Look up at the entrance: a 20-metre squid built from biomaterials made of organic waste, the first thing you see.
A spring day in the Montseny
In the Life room, listen to 24 hours of sound recorded in one corner of the Montseny massif in spring, compressed into a single listening stop.
The Megalodon jaw
In the Extinction room, a replica jaw of a 16-metre shark that lived 20 million years ago.
The Oxford Dodo
A replica of the famous Oxford painting of the dodo, the extinct bird Alice in Wonderland made world-famous and conservationists adopted as a symbol.
Miguelón
In De-extinction, a faithful replica of the most complete skull in human evolution, a pre-Neanderthal from Atapuerca, near a life-size illustration of a Neanderthal woman.

Good for

Cheap Culture
Nerding Out
Small Kids

With kids

Under-16s go free. The kids' space has a library with floor cushions and a big illustrated table where children hunt for 12 Montseny animals with a magnifying glass.