The Wonders of London's Natural History Museum - An In-Depth Guided Tour

Today I'm at London's iconic Natural History Museum to explore 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 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 Sloane. Hans Sloane 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 terra cotta for the entire building, because it could withstand the smoke and smog of filthy Victorian 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 Waterhouse 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 Hintz 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. 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 Hintz 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 Patago titan, Maiorum, 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 taxidermied and skeletal species like these, scientists can learn a lot about evolution. From hoof to horn, this giraffe is 4.35 meters tall. That's 14 feet 3 inches. This lovely giraffe was formerly housed in the Mammals Gallery, which we are going to visit soon, and he was moved here during the Hintz 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 Waterhouse 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 2016, 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 honour 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 truly a magical place for kids of all ages and giant children like myself. Let's head over to the American Mastodon. This is one of the largest land mammals to ever live. Remember, the blue whale, the largest mammal to ever live, and a mastodon, one of the largest mammals on land. He would have been trampling through the pine forests 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 Hints 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 than at the same time as I experience them, so I'm going to walk you through and we're going to explore together. So if you've never seen a full-sized 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 Mantell's 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 Dinosauria, 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 Hintz 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 sauropod dinosaur for the newly founded Carnegie Museum of Natural History, funded by the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Now the resulting find, Dippy, is one of the most complete sauropod 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 VII for display here in London. It drew massive crowds and made the word dinosaur a household word in the UK. The Apatosaurus might have been first, but Carnegie'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 U.S. in Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. Have a look at his long tail. Paleontologists believe that Dippy would have been able to flick its powerful tail at supersonic speed 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 Shrewsbury in Shropshire, Darwin took a five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the role of a naturalist. What he learned in the Galapagos Islands and other regions changed what we know about the natural world, and he proposed the theory of natural selection to explain evolution. Essentially, the fittest individuals are most likely to both survive and reproduce, therefore passing their desirable characteristics on to their offspring. This theory has been used and co-opted by some really dodgy, not to mention racist and classist groups, but the underlying knowledge has informed what we know about evolution ever since. Here, just walking around the mezzanine level, looking out over to Hintz Hall, we can get some great views of this blue whale skeleton. Remember, this was hung here in 2017. These mezzanine levels are also home to a few beautiful displays, again blurring that line between art and artifact. These taxidermied birds are a really important part of the study of ornithology, 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 Cadogan 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 Blaschka glass models, small yet incredibly detailed and unique. Father and son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka created more than 10,000 of these glass models in the 19th century, depicting marine invertebrates, including jellyfish, octopus and squid, that most 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 Blaschka's 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 Fers Platt Handaxe. It was found in Fers Platt in Berkshire in 1919, but it was actually produced by the Acheulean culture more than 400,000 years ago, during the lower Paleolithic period. It is amongst the biggest handaxes 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 Neanderthal 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're 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 Barbary lion that was thought to live in the Tower of London between 1280 and 1385. These were both part of Hans Sloane'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 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 Auk from Newfoundland. The Great Auk 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 Cadogan 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. 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 Devonshire Emerald. Now that's my birthstone, if anybody's considering getting me a gift. This is one of the world's most famous and largest uncut emeralds. It comes in at a whopping 1,383.93 carats. That's 276.786 grams. It was mined at Muzo, Colombia, and then given as a gift, or sold, by Emperor Pedro I of Brazil to William Cavendish VI, the Duke of Devonshire, in 1831. This object 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 hollow cast that grew over a naturally occurring cube of fluorite, and that cube of fluorite has since dissolved. It's called an epimor. What's so mysterious 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 rhodochrosite. 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 rhodochrosite was discovered in the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado, which was originally opened in 1873 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 Winchcombe meteorite, the first meteorite to have been recovered in the UK for 30 years. It blazed through the sky and touched down in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in February 2021, so very recently. It weighs 103 grams 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 chondrite. 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 Fawkes Night, which is November 5th, when we traditionally set off loads of fireworks and light bonfires across the country. Guy was really afraid of the fireworks, 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 Beijing 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 taxidermied mammals. A beautiful horse in motion. Of course, we've all seen bad taxidermy, 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 Hintz Hall had been displayed for decades. 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 right at home. I used to volunteer at BART's Medical Museum, and one of my jobs was to drip the leaking formalin or formaldehyde 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, formaldehyde, et cetera, 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 trawler at 220 meters. He is 8.62 meters long, that's 28.2 feet, 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's staff. The tours are 25 pounds 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 ribcage and bones. This early hominid 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 ape-like and human-like body, with the small skull, long arms, and conical ribcage of an ape's, yet a human-like spine, pelvis, and knees. And that's because she walked upright. 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, Neanderthals. Along with an Asian pre-human species called Denisovans, Neanderthals are humans' closest ancient relatives. We have a common ancestor, from whom we diverged around 650,000 years ago. In 2014, the museum welcomed two new residents, some of the most scientifically accurate life-size Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens models ever made anywhere in the world, made by Dutch twins Adrie and Alphonse 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 explain 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 artifacts are from a group of Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers called Magdalenians. 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 grisly, 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 Britons, 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 gnaw marks and cut marks, 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 Kobe, Japan. A major earthquake struck near Kobe, 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. 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.