A family museum is launching a new exhibition about dragons, co-curated by a former Children’s Laureate.

The Story Museum on Pembroke Street, Oxford, opens its Here be Dragons exhibition on 13 July and it will run until July 2025.

It has been co-curated by Cressida Cowell, author of the bestselling How To Train Your Dragon series, and it explores “the enduring appeal” of the dragon across cultures.

Ms Cowell said it was “important” to visit places like the Story Museum where children could get “excited about reading”.

The creative team behind the exhibition said dragons had featured in stories dating back thousands of years from the Epic of Gilgamesh through to the modern day.

Director and CEO Caroline Jones said they had gathered “precious objects” from fellow museums, archives and individual collections, as well as some “real dragon bones”.

Visitors will travel through a cave to learn about the many different types of dragon, including the Soup Dragon from the TV show The Clangers.

Activities also include having a go at racing dragons and exploring the museum’s treasure chamber.

Ms Cowell said she thinks the allure of dragons stems from “the tantalising idea that they might actually exist”.

“Dragons represent the wild on a map,” she said. “And the very basic thing – we all have a kid inside us that would really like to own their own dragon.”

She added that writing about them “has always been a way of exploring humans’ relationship with nature, with the unknown, with the spiritual”.

Ms Cowell, who was Children’s Laureate from 2019 to 2022, said that books were “joyful, happy, exciting things”.

“That’s why it’s important that we have places like the Story Museum that will get our kids excited about reading,” she said.

Follow BBC South on Facebook, X, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk or via WhatsApp on 0808 100 2240.