Around two million specimens, ranging from fossils to mammals, are stored in a constantly increasing collection in an old military barracks near Dublin's city centre. And now the government is being urged to resource the museum properly and raise it to the status of similar museums around the world.

According to a keeper at the Dublin 4 facility, only about 5% of the contents have actually been catalogued, and it would take 20,000 years for one person to complete the task of sorting them. "We have been accumulating stuff for 200 years, " Mark Holmes, assistant keeper and animal curator said. "To me, it's a treasure trove." Among the items stored at the facility near Haddington Road are drawers of bird skin and mammal skin, giant deer bones, a 'spirit store' of 25,000 jars totalling around 50,000 specimens of fish and other marine life, along with slugs and snails stored in alcohol, over 35,000 shells and an extensive collection of microscopic species on slides.

Ten thousand items are on exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which is located on Merrion Square but the contents of the storage facility at Beggars' Bush on Dublin's southside dwarf that collection.

Last week, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, received a copy of the report on the present status and future needs of the museum. The Office of Public Works is currently reviewing the preservation and extension of the museum building.

The report highlights "chronic understaffing" and "inadequate financial support" as the most immediate problems facing the museum, which became a state-funded repository in 1877. "It has been in a time-warp, " the keeper of the museum, Nigel Monaghan, told the Sunday Tribune, "but that makes it a nostalgia experience. Not many places haven't changed since people's grandparents took them into a building as a child."

The most recent renovation at the museum was carried out by a Dutch taxidermist, who reconstructed the skin of a 150-year-old giraffe on display. The expert rebuilt the animal's frame with foam before stretching a new skin donated by Dublin Zoo over the new artificial skeleton.

Such upkeep is vital to the museum's appeal, according to Christopher Moriarty, chief author of last week's report.

"One of the problems lies in the age of specimens, " he explained. "There is a panda that looks a pale cream, and a lion that is almost white. The natural colours have faded because of exposure to daylight for a hundred years or more.

When children have seen pictures of yellow lions and so on, it's an awful let-down."

On Friday afternoon, the museum was buzzing with visiting tourists and school children. Glass-eyed monkeys, hyenas and rats shelved behind ancient wooden cabinets of quivering glass drew gasps from the visitors. "Fridays are usually quiet enough, but some days are exceptions, " remarked a patrolling staff member happily. The museum is believed to be the last national natural museum in the world to retain the 19th-century structure of a 'cabinet', but that creates problems of its own. Many of the cabinets that line the balconies on the upper floors of the museum are covered with leather sheets, in an attempt to protect the contents from the natural light that streams through surrounding windows.

The report's plans for the museum are somewhat ambitious, and overtake the demands of staff members by some distance. "The staff are well aware of all the shortcomings, " said Moriarty. "But if they were to ask for everything that was needed it would probably be laughed out of court. . . we were coming from the point of outsiders deciding what it needed rather than what we could hope to do. It's a turning point because now the administration cannot say, 'Nobody ever told us what was needed.'" The authors of the report recommend developing the museum so that it reaches the standard of other facilities in countries with a similar GDP to Ireland, such as Denmark.

"While it constitutes an invaluable national asset and contains much material of the highest quality, the museum falls far short of the excellence demanded by contemporary international standards, " the report says.

Proposals include the addition of interactive features and adding an extension to the south of the building to accommodate modern displays, classrooms and a cafe.

But for now, staff, volunteers and visitors will continue to sort through the massive storage collection, and who knows what that process might unearth.