Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The Leicester Museum & Art Gallery is a museum on New Walk in Leicester, England, not far from the city centre. It opened in 1849 as one of the first public museums in the United Kingdom. Leicester Museum & Art Gallery contains displays of science, history and art, both international and local. The original building was designed by Joseph Hansom, designer of the hansom cab. It has been expanded several times, most recently in 2011. Permanent exhibits include dinosaurs, an Egyptian area, minerals of Leicestershire, the first Charnia fossil identified nearby, and a wildspace area featuring stuffed animals from around the world. Leicester Museum & Art Gallery has a significant collection of extinct lifeforms. Two Mesozoic reptile skeletons are permanently on display — a cetiosaur found in Rutland, and a plesiosaur from Barrow upon Soar. The Rutland Dinosaur, affectionately nicknamed George, is a specimen of Cetiosaurus oxoniensis. The 15 metres dinosaur, which is among the most complete sauropod skeletons in the world, was discovered in June 1968, in the Williamson Cliffe quarry near Little Casterton in Rutland. The skeletal remains have been in the museum since 1975; the majority of the bones in the display are replicas of the originals, which are too fragile to be used. The Rutland Dinosaur featured on an episode of Blue Peter, and was opened by Blue Peter's Janet Ellis in 1985. The Barrow Kipper, named after the flattened fish, is a skeleton of an unidentified plesiosaur discovered in Barrow upon Soar in 1851. Originally classified as Plesiosaurus macrocephalus, it was later reclassified as Rhomaleosaurus megacephalus. However, according to Adam Smith and Gareth Dyke, the fossil is actually of another, unnamed genus. In September 2011, the museum expanded its Dinosaur Gallery, reorganizing fossils, adding a new room, and modifying the gallery itself. The new Dinosaur Gallery, which predominantly features extinct marine reptiles, was opened by David Attenborough. The star attractions of the new gallery include the aforementioned Rutland cetiosaur, Charnia and plesiosaur fossils, as well as a Leedsichthys fossil and a piece of the Barwell Meteorite. The museum holds a specimen of international importance, the Charnia fossil. It is the first fossil that was ever described that came from undoubted Precambrian rocks, which until this point had been thought to be too early for large forms of life. The object in the museum – Leicester's fossil celebrity – is a holotype, that is, the actual physical example from which the species was first identified and formally described. Charnia masoni was named after Roger Mason, who discovered it at Charnwood Forest in 1957, when he was a schoolboy, and who went on to a career as an academic geologist. He acknowledges, and the museum's Charnia display explains, that the fossil had been discovered a year earlier by a schoolgirl, Tina Negus, but no one took her seriously.