 Three of the museum's permanent collections are housed in the Yorkshire Museum building all of which have English designated collection status, which means they are "pre-eminent collections of national and international importance".The biology collection contains 200,000 specimens, including both fauna and flora, with most of the collection made up of insects.There are two stuffed specimens of the extinct great auk, an almost complete skeleton of an extinct moa and a large collection of specimens from the Yorkshire region including the remains of elephants, cave bears and hyena from Kirkdale Cave dated to the Quaternary period, around 125,000 years ago.