One of Britain’s largest natural history collections is to shroud its exhibits of extinct and endangered species in black mourning veils to highlight the global biodiversity crisis.

Isla Gladstone, a senior curator at Bristol Museum, said the museum wanted to respond to the seriousness of the scientific threats to wildlife and plants, identified in a recent UN report.

Gladstone said the inspiration came from children at Freshford primary school, near Bath, who wrote to the museum demanding it told the true story behind a fiercely-posed Bengal tiger exhibit, as well as other specimens. The tiger was one of 39 shot dead by King George V with a team of British officials in Nepal in 1911. Eighteen rhinos and four sloth bears were also killed during the expedition.

Isla Gladstone, a senior curator at Bristol Museum, with the Bengal tiger exhibit. Photograph: Bristol Museum

“The tiger has such a powerful story, shocking and devastating,” Gladstone said. “The children went away and started researching after their visit and were incredibly affected by it. There were 100,000 tigers in the wild when this one was shot. Today there are less than 4,000.”

“The extinction crisis is causing a lot of anxiety among people,” she added. “We have a unique role to play with our animal stories and histories, and in creating a space for conversation and doing something positive to raise awareness. We want to help people imagine a world without these incredible creatures.

“Some animals on the list are surprising, like the giraffe and chimp. Familiarity is part of the problem. Extinctions can be silent, especially as many iconic animals seem a common part of our everyday culture.”

The museum is among several in Britain and elsewhere in Europe to step up a gear in conveying conservation messages. The Horniman Museum, in London, and the Rotterdam Natural History Museum have littered their tanks and animal cabinets with plastic pollution, the latter’s exhibits including a hedgehog that died with its head stuck in a McFlurry container. Meanwhile, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, and others are displaying Extinction Rebellion memorabilia.

Among the black shrouded displays in Bristol will be a stuffed western lowland gorilla called Alfred. He was found as a baby and reportedly nursed by a local African woman after his parents were shot dead, and was later sold by traders to Bristol zoo. The species is now critically endangered.

A chimpanzee exhibit at Bristol Museum is shrouded in black. Photograph: Fay Curtis/Bristol Museum

Other veiled exhibits of endangered species include a colonial captain’s pet gin-drinking chimpanzee from the 1800s, and a Sumatran rhino who in 1884 survived capture by hunters as a baby, and in death escaped fire and ruin when the old Bristol Museum site was bombed during the second world war.

Also shrouded will be a thylacine which once lived in London zoo, one of the last of the Tasmanian marsupials which became extinct in the 1930s. The blackouts also feature species including the Galapagos giant tortoise, gharial, hawksbill turtle, kakapo, aye-aye, mountain gazelle, okapi, pangolin, toucan and albatross.

Prof Ben Garrod, an ambassador for Bristol Museum, said: “Through the effects of climate change, pollution, exploitation, introduced species and habitat loss, we are making it harder and harder for other species to share the planet. This exhibition plans to inform, shock and inspire, so that hopefully, museum visitors will leave ready to take action and do what they can to stop the loss of species.”