Visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum, Home to Over 200 Penises

New York is filled with unusual and unique museums. We have the Morbid Anatomy Library which contains a collection of mummified, pickled, fossilized and waxed specimens and the Long Island City Elevator Historical Society which gives a detailed historical narrative of the elevator as an invention that revolutionized transportation and architecture, just to name a few. But one museum concept New York is yet to tap into is a collection of phalluses. And on that front, Iceland’s got us beat. Take a trip to Reykjavik to visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum – a museum filled with penises.

Great Big Story recently interviewed the museum’s curator and owner Hjortur Sigurdsson, who has been collecting animal penises in 1974 after his father was given a dried bull penis as a joke. Housing 285 specimens of animal penises, the museum goes as far as to cover its lights in scrotum skins.

Sigurdsson says he’s most fascinated by the diversity of color, shape and size of the specimens. According to the Museum’s website, there are “fifty-five specimens belonging to sixteen different kinds of whale, one specimen taken from a rogue polar bear, thirty-six specimens belonging to seven different kinds of seal and walrus, and more than one hundred fifteen specimens originating from twenty different kinds of land mammals.”

The hardest one to acquire, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a human’s. Sigurdsson explains that it was taken from a 95-year-old man, so there was a bit of “shrinkage.” He’s optimistic that they’ll be able to a better example soon.

If you’re wondering what the biggest penis in the collection is, we were too. It’s the sperm whale, weighing roughly 150 pounds.

Next, check out this list of New York’s off-the-beaten-path museums.