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Superb museum of Scotland's heritage. You enter into the lofty Victorian Grand Gallery, where the millennium clock chimes on the hour. Exhibition halls cover Scottish and world history and culture, science, technology, art and design, and natural history. Dolly the sheep, the 12th-century Lewis chess pieces, and dinosaurs are some of the highlights. NMS also run the War Museum in the castle, the Museum of Flight near Gullane, and the Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride.
The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a museum of Scottish history and culture.
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David Talbot Rice (1903-72) was in the louche crowd at Oxford that inspired Brideshead Revisited and became a distinguished scholar of East Mediterranean and Russian art, with extensive contacts in those parts - how come this fellow was never implicated in a spy ring? His spell as University Vice Principal is commemorated in this gallery with changing exhibitions of contemporary art. It's housed within Old College of Edinburgh University, a fine building built between 1789 and 1827 by Robert Adam and Henry Playfair. The Georgian Gallery has a Playfair interior and a mixture of Old Masters and modern installations.
Large performance venue, home of the Scottish Ballet and Scottish Opera. It also hosts contemporary dance, ballet, musicals and panto.
Large collection of anatomical specimens and life and death masks. Best known is the skeleton of William Burke, hanged in 1829 after he and William Hare killed at least 16 people to sell the bodies for dissection. Limited opening as the area is in continual use for teaching, booking essential.
See Edinburgh#Connect for how to access. The internet stations are in the Learning Centre, and the building houses Central Lending Library, Central Reference Library, Central Children's Library, Edinburgh and Scottish Collections, Art & Design Library and Music Library. It has a wealth of material for research such as old newspapers and maps, but births, marriages and deaths are filed at East Register House by the bus station in New Town.
The permanent exhibitions are the Pathology Museum, the History of Surgery and the Dental Museum. Not suitable for children under 10 as the exhibits include human remains.
A venerable reference library, which you need membership to access, but it has public exhibitions about literature. "Treasures" is its permanent exhibition. But don't stumble in here mistaking it for Central Library across the street.