today I'm at London's iconic Natural History Museum to explore a millennia of science Earth animals dinosaurs and more the Natural History Museum opened here in South Kensington in 1881 in addition to just being a place to go and gaze and wonder at specimens this is a working Research Institute there are more than 300 scientists on staff who study the collection to learn more about the past present and future of our natural world did you know that the Natural History Museum was originally part of the British museum to learn a little bit about that we have to talk about Sir Hans Sloan Hans Sloan was an important figure in the history of the museum but we also have to remember that he was involved in the slave trade his social class and his wealth allowed him to exploit resources and people when he died in 1753 his will allowed Parliament to buy his extensive collection of more than 71,000 items for 20,000 and that was a lot less than what the collection was worth this was the start of the British museum which I talk about in the video linked above now we also need to talk about Sir Richard Owen he actually coined the term dinosaur which I'm going to talk more about later on he used to curate the hunterian museum but he left in 1856 to take over the British Museum's Natural History collection by the way the hunterian museum has been closed for years now it's set to reopen next year and you can guarantee I'll be there in opening week like so many other Museum curators Richard Owen began complaining about his lack of space for the ever growing collection of Natural History specimens that's when plans for this stunning building launched architect Alfred Waterhouse was eventually given the job and he chose terracotta for the entire building because it could withstand the smoke and smog of filthy Victoria in London remember at this time in history museums were often expensive places only for the social Elite but the British museum was free to quote studious and curious people so it was decided that the Natural History Museum would also be free to all who wanted to attend of course you still needed leisure time to be able to visit now waterhous called this Victorian Gothic Revival Behemoth his Cathedral to Nature he worked with sir Owen to ensure that the museum would meet the needs of the collection they needed space for the newly discovered dinosaurs yes but also for whales and woolly mammoths and so much more Owen and Waterhouse both came up with the idea that the museum be decorated with natural history inspired gargoyles and just look they're absolutely amazing and they're all over the building did I mention that this place is absolutely huge you've already seen some of the scale let's continue on we're now entering hints Hall which was completely reimagined and renovated in 2017 think of this as the gateway to the rest of the museum in each of these alcoves you'll find remarkable pieces from The Collection representing some of the best that the museum has to offer and also highlighting important issues about conservation and the environment now of course we have to start with this monolithic creature above us the blue whale skeleton this is hope the blue whale she's a real skeleton taken from a young female blue whale that beached in Ireland in 1891 she has been suspended here above hints Hall since 2017 the blue whale is the largest animal to ever exist that's right he's even larger than the largest dinosaur which was the Pago Titan mayorum aka the titanosaur and yes I had to look that up let's head over to the giraffes I really love giraffes a couple of years ago my husband and I stayed at the Giraffe Manor Hotel in Nairobi Kenya and so this is the first thing that I'm going to check out while I'm here these giraffes behind me the tallest of all living animals through studying taxid and skeletal species like these scientists can learn a lot about Evolution from hoof to Horn this giraffe is 4.35 M tall that's 14' 3 in this lovely giraffe was formerly housed in the mammals Gallery which we are going to visit soon and he was moved here during the hints Hall overhaul this giant Coral was a part of the reef in Western Australia it was collected 100 years ago and at the time it was the largest Coral specimen in any Museum in the world it is turbinaria coral and specimens like this are important in museum settings because they can help scientists understand the impact of climate change and raising ocean temperatures on coral reefs and other species my husband and I scuba dive avidly and trust me the coral reef is often a good indicator of the health of the local environment and the oceans I just love pointing out these little details look at this small bird and you can see I'm holding my hand up to it so you can see the size everywhere you go in this Museum you're going to find tiny little details here that are easy to overlook that was water and Richard Owen working together here's a Ram's Head as well they were working together to make sure that the building matched the unique beauty of the collection here we have a blue marlin this fish when alive is bright blue on the top and paler below the pale Underside makes it difficult for other fish to spot this Predator circling above them this Marlin is a recent addition to the museum it washed up in Wales in 201 16 and it was the first complete specimen of its type to ever land on British Shores and now it really does have a place of honor here in hints Hall it's impossible to not feel like a kid again when you come to the Natural History Museum there are museums dedicated specifically to children in London and I love those too I used to work at one but this this is something else it's a truly a magical place for kids of all ages and Giant children like myself let's head over to the American Mastadon this is one of the largest land mammals to ever live remember the blue whale the largest mammal to ever live and a Mastadon one of the largest mammals on land he would have been trampling through the Pine Forest of North America as recently as 13,000 years ago however they likely went extinct due to a mixture of both changing climate and being hunted by the first humans to reach these areas these butterflies are our last stop here in hint Hall the museum holds a massive collection of insects over 37 million some of them are actually undescribed they're still in cabinets and they've never been studied and others are used actively in research on everything from silk production parasitic wasps and climate change I love the way they've been arranged here like Fine Art I mean they really are you can see that in a lot of different places in the Natural History Museum Where Art and Science merge together there's really no better way for you to experience the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum then at the same time as I experien them so I'm going to walk you through and we're going to explore it together so if you've never seen a full-size dinosaur in person the Natural History Museum is the place to be this is one of the world's most important and famous dinosaur collections So This Modern dinosaur collection that we're wandering through now is based on Gideon Mel original collections which he acquired between 1838 and 1853 mainly from Sussex in England since that time the museum has added many other collections from all over the UK US Canada Southern and Eastern Africa are all well represented now I know that we think of dinosaurs as something that has been around forever in our lifetimes but prior to the 1850s dinosaurs were either completely unknown or thought of as something mythical while people all over the world had found dinosaur bones since time immemorial and constructed narratives around what they could be modern excavation practices didn't begin until the middle of the 19th century in 1842 Richard Owen became famous as he announced his discovery of dinosaurs a term he came up with he described them as quote immense animals with thick limb bones and strong reinforced hips and he said they were quote most perfect modifications of The Reptilian type as early as the 1820s scientists had learned about massive prehistoric sea reptiles and 20 years later they were just starting to learn that the gigantic reptiles had also lived on land as well the first discovered in England was called Megalosaurus and more kept coming however they were not really thought of as relatives of one another until Owen proposed that they should be United as a group that he called dinura which means fearfully great lizards and you can see they are fearfully great throughout the museum by the way we have another very famous collection of dinosaurs in London but they aren't at all accurate like these they're actually Outdoors at Crystal Palace in South London they were designed by natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in 1854 they were the world's first full-scale dinosaur reconstructions and they represent the first three species discovered although today we know that they're not at all accurate but they're still fun to visit by the way it's really fun to visit most of London's museums at Christmas because a lot of them get decorated and the Natural History Museum is no exception last year they put this Christmas jumper on the animatronic T-Rex and I hope it's a tradition they continue while we're on the topic of dinosaurs we need to come and visit dippy now if you're around my age and British you'll know dippy the Diplodocus he was the main attraction in hints hall for 35 years from 1979 to 2014 he was then toured around the country for years and he's back here at the Natural History Museum just for a temporary exhibit I'm lucky enough to be here at the right time to see him he was originally found in 1899 on an expedition to find a sorod dinosaur for the newly founded Carnegie Museum of Natural History funded by the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew carnegi now the resulting find dippy is one of the most complete sauod skeletons ever found however the American Museum of Natural History Carnegie's competitor unveiled its composite Apatosaurus in 1905 while dippy was still in the process of being excavated and that really teed Carnegie off he wanted to have the first one and he missed it by a matter of months so he decided to do something very showy he bested the American Museum of Natural History by having dippy fully cast in plaster and gifted to King Edward iith for display here in London it drew massive crowds and made the word dinosaur a household word in the the UK the Apatosaurus might have been first but cari's Diplodocus was the most famous and he still is just a bit of scientific info about this famous dinosaur Diplodocus lived around 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic Period roaming in packs around the Western Us in Colorado Montana Utah and Wyoming have a look at his long taale paleontologists believe that dippy would have been able to flick its powerful tail at supersonic speeds like a cracking whip here we have a statue of Charles Darwin the great thinker who helped us understand the natural world of course his natural theories of evolution rocked the world and also caused controversy with members of the Church of England ironic then that he was later interred at Westminster Abbey originally from shrewbury in Shropshire Darwin took a 5-year Voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the role of a naturalist what he learned in the galapagus: but the underlying knowledge has informed what we know about Evolution ever since here just walking around the mezzanine level looking out over to hints Hall we can get some great views of this blue whale skeleton remember this was hung here in 2017 now these mezzanine levels are also home to a few beautiful displays again blurring that line between art and artifact these Taxidermy birds are really important part of the study of orthology amongst its massive collection of 80 million items the Natural History Museum has over 1 million bird specimens which represent 95% of all bird species this is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of ornithology in the world we are now in one of my favorite rooms the Kaden Gallery it houses some of the most special artifacts in the museum many of which are small and would be easy to overlook otherwise let's start with the blaska glass models small yet incredibly detailed and unique father andon team Leopold and Rudolph blaska created more than 10,000 of these glass models in the 19th century depicting Marine invertebrates including jellyfish octopus and squid that most people people would have never had an opportunity to see remember underwater photography had not yet been invented the Natural History Museum is home to more than 180 of these glass sculptures which the blaska based on contemporary scientific illustrations and on living invertebrates they kept in a saltwater aquarium rather than scrunched up at the bottom of a glass and quickly losing their bright colors like a real live animal would have done these glass models stay inflated and rich in color so we can admire and study them this is another perfect example of how Art and Science can intersect let's look here at the fur plats hand ax it was found in fur plat in barkshire in 1919 but it was actually produced by the aulian culture more than 400,000 years ago during the lower Paleolithic period it is amongst the biggest hand is ever found in Europe and it requires two hands to hold and use therefore it likely would not and could not have been used as an Axe and it was probably a neander tal status symbol you can see just how big it is here compared to my hand now here you're seeing me do something that you not normally allowed to do in a museum but the Natural History Museum does have quite a few objects that you are allowed to handle and touch and here is a nautilus shell as well as the skull of a barbery lion that was thought to live in the Tower of London between 1280 and 1385 these were both part of Hans Sloan's Personal Collection I told you this room is full of treasures let's have a look at the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species one of the most important books on biology ever written this Tome details natural selection and the theory of evolution it was published in 1859 and this first edition is incredibly rare let's move on here now to Charles Darwin's pigeons so we often think of Galapagos finches called Darwin's finches as the inspiration for his ideas on Evolution however the humble pigeon was even more important to his work that's because Darwin bred pigeons in his garden Crossing birds with specific characteristics with each other to generate Offspring he called this artificial selection and it helped him gain the evidence he needed for his theories of natural selection just as a note I'm a huge lover of pigeons I really feel terrible for them because of course we domesticated them in the 19th century as messenger pigeons and then when we no longer needed them because of advancing Telegraph and telephone technology we threw them out onto the street so it's no wonder that they're kind of of awkward and not very good at taking care of themselves one species of bird with Endless Possibilities here's one that shows us the devastation that humans can have on different animal populations the great a from New Finland the great o lived on Rocky islands in the North Atlantic and it did not go extinct due to Habitat destruction it was instead exploited and intensely hunted for its oil eggs feathers and meat shockingly its dwindling numbers spawned an even greater demand to hunt and kill the bird collectors wanted to obtain it more than ever to preserve its skins feathers and eggs for Museum collections yikes always remember that museums are not neutral places The kadan Collection is kind of like a museum within the museum and so too is the Vault the geology Museum was founded in 1835 and it used to be a separate Museum Museum however a corridor was built between the two in 1985 and the museums were merged as a way to get people interested in some of this section's more valuable and remarkable objects the curators have created The Vault you could spend hours in here gazing at each of the objects in Wonder but I'm just going to point out a few pieces let's start with the Duke of devonere emerald now that's my birthstone if anybody's considering getting me a gift this this is one of the world's most famous and largest uncut emeralds it comes in at a whopping 1,3 83.93 karat that's 276.50 was actually displayed at the great exhibition that year this is the crystal box mystery and this is such an unusual object it's my favorite in this room it's a Hol cast That Grew over a naturally occurring cube of fluorite and that cube of fluorite has since dissolved it's called an epimorphs about it well the original inner material should have dissolved long after the outer box so we're not sure what happened here another beautiful bonus is that yet another mineral has started to grow inside the cavity this is Roto crite normally this mineral is milky pink but in rare cases it can form dark Scarlet crystals just as you can see here I really hope it comes across on camera because it is so beautiful in person this piece of Roc crite was discovered in the Sweet Home mine in Colorado which was originally opened in 18 1973 to mine for silver but the miners reported coming across these red crystals the Sweet Home mine closed in 1967 but stories swirled for decades about these unusual minerals then in 1991 it was reopened specifically to mine for these gems and this one in particular was found in 1992 the area of the mine in which it was found the good luck pocket this is a piece of the winchcomb meteorite the first meteorite to have been recovered in the UK for 30 years it blazed through the sky and touched down in wincham gler Shere in February 2021 so very recently it weighs 103 G and dates to the birth of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago not only is it rare for simply being a meteorite recovered in the UK it is also a special type of meteorite called a carbonaceous condite only around 1,000 of the world's known meteorites are of this type so I've been lucky enough to see chimpanzees orangutans and all kinds of baboons in the wild but I've never seen gorillas so this is actually the closest that I've gotten this is Guy the gorilla guy was brought to the London Zoo in 1947 on guy Fox night which is November 5th when we traditionally set off loads of fireworks and light bonfires across the country now guy was really afraid of the fireworks works and he wouldn't actually go to sleep until one of the zookeepers slept with him which I think is incredibly sweet for those of us with dogs or maybe even cats you already know just how upsetting those fireworks can be guy was very beloved and people would come from all over the world to visit him but tragically he died of heart failure during a routine surgery in 1978 with a similar tale of captivity here's Chi-Chi the panda living on forever just near one of the cafes at the Natural History Museum Chi-Chi was taken from her native province of Sichuan China when she was just a few months old and originally sent to the beij Jing Zoo then Frankfurt and finally to London in 1956 now if you're going to visit this part of the museum you should probably like Taxidermy because this is where they keep the mammals the Taxidermy mammals a beautiful horse in motion of course we've all seen bad tax dermy but the Taxidermy here at the Natural History Museum is some of the best in the world wandering around the mammals collection you're going to see fascinating land and sea mammals from all over the world including these rhinoceroses this one with a sign letting you know that the horn is fake that's right even in what should be the safety of the museum rhinoceroses are still threatened by poachers now we have a humongous model of a blue whale but it's here in the mammals gallery that hope the blue whale now hanging in hint Hall had been displayed for decades ah look at how 80s this is I love it and here we can see land mammals like elephants and then looking up above us whales Dolphins narwhals this is a fascinating gallery and it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future a moose right behind me I feel very at home I used to volunteer at Bart's Medical Museum and one of my jobs was to drip the leaking formalin or form Malahide from old Victorian human specimens so I'm very familiar with being surrounded by body parts in jars and in this case though many of them animals plants flora and fauna this is the Natural History Museum's Spirit collection named because historically rather than being preserved in chemical preparations for Malahide itself Etc things were preserved in alcohol hence the name Spirits the spirit collection is home to more than 23 million specimens and we've been preserving specimens of plants and animals in alcohol since at least the early 18th century and there are some really wonderful things in this collection including Charles Darwin's pet octopus these octopuses were not Darwin's but they are also fascinating and beautiful one other specimen I want to mention though we can't see it today is Archie the giant squid this species is so rare that it was long thought to be a myth however Archie was caught by a fishing trer at 220 M he is 8.62 M long that's 28.2 ft and his DNA helped prove that there is only one giant squid species most of the really wondrous Treasures are not accessible to the public unless you take a dedicated tour led by one of the spirit collection staff the tours are 25 lb per adult and they last around 45 minutes and here you can see that they're doing some restoration work and creating new displays for the mammals Gallery which is getting a big renovation in the next few years I love talking about the inner workings of a museum so let me know if you'd like to see a video on how museums work now we're just heading into the human evolution exhibit so the human evolution Gallery is all about exploring what makes us human it takes us through 7 million years of human evolution from the very first hominins to the last surviving human species which of course is us here we can see Lucy who is Australopithecus afarensis afar is a region of Ethiopia and this is a cast of her rib cage and Bones this early homonid lived in East Africa 3.7 million to 3 million years ago the species was discovered in 1974 Lucy here has a mixture of an aplike and humanlike body with the small skull long arms and conical rib cage of an Apes yet a humanlike spine pelvis and knees and that's because she walked up right she was nicknamed Lucy after the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds which was really popular at the time she was found now jumping from millions of years ago let's talk about someone a little closer in time to us neander tals along with an Asian prehuman species called Dennis sovian neandertals are hum's closest ancient relatives we have a common ancestor from whom we diverged around around 650,000 years ago in 2014 the museum welcomed two new residents some of the most scientifically accurate life-sized neandertal and early Homo sapiens models ever made anywhere in the world made by Dutch Twins adrey and alons Kennis they make these hyper realistic models by rebuilding a skeleton combined with computer scans and 3D printing they use wire cables in the spine and flexible silicone between the vertebrae the brothers explained that they use five different layers of silicone to make the skin color because as they say real skin is translucent and trust me in person these look hyper realistic now one final display I want to talk about here is the cheddar man skeleton and the model head reconstruction these these artifacts are from a group of crom magnan hunter gatherers called magdalenian they probably entered our Island from Belgium and the Netherlands around 15,000 years ago when a land bridge still connected Britain to Europe the cheddar Gorge finds give us fascinating insight into how early modern humans in Britain lived as well as their cultural practices they are also quite Grizzly that's right archaeologists discovered a human skull shaped into a cup in this Somerset cave and to make things even more interesting these very early Britain who lived during the Ice Age did not need to eat human flesh out of necessity it seems they did it as part of a ritual the evidence points to a quote sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains the remains of a number of individuals including a teenager and a three-year-old child show clear evidence of cannibalism they have GW marks and cutmarks and their ribs have been cracked open to extract marrow three of the skulls were carefully shaped to create cups or bowls and in the same cave they found the oldest known engraving of a human bone with zigzag marks carved into a forearm bone to create an intentional pattern let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see a video where I visit the cheddar Gorge and Somerset now heading up this escalator which was completed in 1996 is a lot of fun when I told my husband I was making this video he said are you going to go up the escalator and I said of course now it takes us into the display on earthquakes and volcanoes being from Vancouver on an earthquake zone I'm very well familiar with the science of earthquakes and earthquake preparedness here the earthquake simulator demonstrates what it felt like to be in the 1995 earthquake in coob Japan a major earthquake struck near coob killing more than 6,000 people and making more than 45,000 people homeless in just a few minutes on these islands four major tectonic plates connect the Eurasian Philippine Pacific and North American and they like to let us know that they're there this earthquake simulator which is a huge draw for families and kids and of course me also recreates that 6.9 magnitude Quake which caused more than 100 billion in damage and that's in 1995 money now as you can see here everything is shaking from the Stacked shelves to the floor itself and it's really common to hear people squealing in surprise I have to admit it was a lot more realistic than I thought it would be the whole room sways side to side so you can feel like what it feels like to be in an earthquake it's actually making me a bit motion sick well that's it for me here at the Natural History Museum today I've really had a great time exploring a lot more than I actually thought I would so let me know in the comments below what museums you'd like to see me cover next remember to like And subscribe and share this video with anyone who loves museums and I'll see you the next time I'm in the museum
