What exhibits in a museum are genuine?

Visitors are often confounded by the idea that some specimens are not originals, but this does not make them fake or guesswork

Perhaps the most common question that is posed to museum staff and educators dealing with things like fossils and other artefacts is: "Is it real?". In itself, it's a perfectly reasonable question, especially when someone has the unexpected privilege to touch and hold a specimen and wants to know if this really is an original of some kind.

Often though it can come from incredulity, that something like a tyrannosaur tooth really could exist or be real. In my own case, working with dinosaurs, this is also a quite reasonable question - their bones can be so outsized, bizarrely proportioned and downright strange that some scepticism that these could possibly be genuine is quite understandable. However, the intonation of the query if often plain that someone quite simply doesn't believe that these things are actually real but in some way a fabrication, and here is where things get tricky as some specimens and exhibits are rather more 'real' than others.