Ttangkkut Marine Natural History Museum

A collection that began at sea

In 1979, Im Yang-su boarded a deep-sea fishing vessel and found animals he had never seen before coming up in the nets. He began collecting specimens because the material seemed too unusual to disappear back into private memory

That habit grew into a museum first opened in 2002. A larger three-story building opened in Ttangkkut Village in 2019 after about two years of construction, with four exhibition halls, a video theater, activity spaces and storage. At the reopening, the collection included more than 56,000 items representing roughly 1,500 types of marine and natural-history material

Shells and coral sit within the same collecting story as fish, sharks, crustaceans, land animals, fossils and Antarctic specimens. The museum grew through decades of handling actual biological material accumulated specimen by specimen

A blue whale fixes the scale

A blue-whale skeleton measuring about 25 metres sets the scale immediately. Its bones weigh around three tonnes. Nearby, a real minke-whale fetus specimen brings the scale sharply back down. Its body curve, flipper position and blowhole remain visible, giving a very different anatomical view from the skeleton

The museum also preserves fish as dry taxidermy, a technically difficult approach that keeps body shape visible without relying only on liquid preservation. Moving from shell structure to shark anatomy, dried fish and whale bone makes preservation itself part of the natural-history lesson

When the larger museum opened in 2019, real specimens were a defining part of the displays. Real material does not repeat the clean uniformity of a model: shells, skeletons and preserved bodies keep different surfaces and structures visible

The collection rewards close looking

The four permanent halls group the material broadly around the sea’s origins and diversity, large marine animals, sharks and shells, and marine or terrestrial life including Antarctic specimens. The strongest moments come from comparing forms rather than trying to count exhibits

A shell can be read for growth and structure; a shark specimen for body plan; a skeleton for scale. Children can follow unusual animals while adults can spend more time on preservation and anatomy

Seasonal activities add making and ecology programs, but the permanent collection carries the visit. Decades of collecting remain visible in the variety of real objects on display

Before you go

Ttangkkut Marine Natural History Museum sits inside Ttangkkut Village, close to the coast, port and the village’s other sightseeing stops. About an hour is a realistic baseline for the permanent halls, with extra time useful when seasonal activities are running

The blue-whale section benefits from a slower pace than the denser specimen displays. Its physical scale is the clearest reference point for understanding how wide the collection runs, from small shells to the largest animals represented in the museum