The Natural History Museum in London

London’s Natural History Museum is perhaps one of the most famous museums of its kind in the world, and one of London’s biggest tourist attractions, welcoming over five million visitors each year. Opened in 1881 but not separated from the British Museum until 1963, it contains around 80 million specimens covering five main sections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology, and zoology. The museum is especially well known for its dinosaur exhibition, which includes a life-sized animatronic model of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In fact, the palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen, who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, was responsible for the move of natural history specimens from the British Museum to their own home here. Until 2016, the museum’s Hintze Hall featured a cast skeleton of a Diplodocus, nicknamed ‘Dippy’, as its centrepiece. Dippy is now currently on a tour of different museums in the UK, having been replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale (nicknamed ‘Hope’), as a reminder to visitors that we have the responsibility to look after our planet’s biodiversity.

The museum is split into four different zones:

• Red zone: this area explores our planet’s changing history, and includes the Earth hall, home to ‘Sophie’, the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton ever discovered. Other rooms in this zone include Human Evolution, Earth’s Treasures and From the Beginning.
• Green zone: this looks at the evolution of Earth, and features galleries dedicated to Birds, Creepy Crawlies, and Fossil Marine Reptiles, the last of which features the skeleton of the giant sloth Megatherium at its end.
• Blue zone: focussed on the diversity of life on the planet, this zone includes the Dinosaurs exhibition, a room for Fish, Amphibians and Reptiles, and the Mammals room. There is also a separate room with the model of a blue whale, among other large mammals both living and extinct.
• Orange zone: features the Darwin Centre (home to an 8.62-metre long giant squid nicknamed ‘Archie’), Attenborough Studio, and the Wildlife Garden outside the museum building.

I visited the museum in the summer of 2011, having been inspired by pictures of all the different fossils and animal specimens from the museum on the internet, and from watching many documentaries on prehistoric life, including Walking With Dinosaurs and its spinoffs. I enjoyed the dinosaur exhibition and seeing the skeletons of all the different dinosaurs, as well as the animatronic T-Rex. I also loved the blue whale room and seeing the specimens of all the large mammals; on the left when entering this room is the skeleton of my favourite prehistoric mammal, Arsinoitherium, a rhino-like herbivore that lived in North Africa around 35 million years ago. A couple of days later, we visited the museum again for an Age of the Dinosaur exhibition, which featured animatronic models of a Camarasaurus, Archaeopteryx, Gallimimus and Tarbosaurus, among other dinosaurs. Coincidentally, we ended up visiting the same exhibition one year later at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

The Natural History Museum in London is such a fascinating and enjoyable experience that I wanted to visit it again, especially after watching the Sky documentary film David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive, which recreates some of the extinct animals in the museum using CGI. I would eventually revisit the museum with my mother in 2024. The most obvious change since our last visit was the replacement of Dippy with the blue whale skeleton in the central hall as mentioned above, but we spent the day looking around the whole museum and photographing things we failed to snap last time, such as the Arsinoitherium, Andrewsarchus (a giant carnivorous mammal known from a single skull), shoebill, Ethiopian wolf and Javan rhinoceros, among others. We also attended the museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, to see the impressive photos entered into the WPotY competition in 2023.

At the top of this page is a 2-minute video of our trip to the museum, mostly featuring the dinosaur exhibition.