PEACOCKS, beavers and wolves were on the loose in Museum Gardens yesterday as the refurbishment of a top York attraction began.

The Yorkshire Museum closed its doors to the public on Sunday for the start of a £2 million refurbishment that will totally change the museum’s interior.

But before this could happen hundreds of the museum’s star objects had to be transferred to the York Museums Trust stores.

Amy Parkinson, learning manager at the Yorkshire Museum, said: “It is an exciting time for the museum as all the plans we have been making to refurbish the museum start to actually happen.

“The first job is to move all of the amazing artefacts currently on show so the work can begin, with many artefacts going to our stores. These animals are the first to be taken out to be conserved – ready to return next summer to form part of a new natural history gallery.”

The museum will reopen on August 1 next year with three new galleries, a learning level and an audio-visual history of York in the Tempest Anderson Hall.

The natural history gallery will be entitled Extinct and take visitors on an adventure through hundreds of millions of years of life and death on earth. It will look at the fate of dinosaurs and other extinct animals from the past and present and argue that extinctions are a way of life.