Mysteries of the Natural History Museum: Whales, Fossils & Prehistoric Finds

In this episode... I need to wear, like, racing shoes. The events team are under pressure, putting on an awards show for the biggest wildlife photography competition in the world. These images should get us to sit up and take note. There are urgent repairs on a Triceratops fossil. Think of it as polyfilla for a dinosaur fossil. And we dive with giant whales. It's been a really emotional journey. It's early morning at the Natural History Museum and they're expecting a new delivery of dinosaurs. Morning, Shereen. Morning, Sam. Can you give me a hand with these? Stuffed cuddly ones. And it's manager Sam's job to get them on the shelves. We've got more of the jumbos in. Excellent. Where do you want to put those? Well, I think in the centre is great, because not only are you visible, but, you know, we really want those little kids still to grab one and give it a good hug. In fact, it never stops for the museum's 900 staff. And today, the pressure's really on, as the clock's ticking. It's the opening of the biggest event in the museum's calendar, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards. In the gallery, the world's greatest wildlife photos are being prepared for display. One hundred of the best have been chosen and they'll soon be announced to the world. In Award HQ, event manager Sophie Lorenz is checking final details. Come and look and tell me what you think of the sting. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year is the largest photography competition of its type in the world. It's been running for 58 years and has around 40,000 entrants from 93 countries, and it kicks off with a grand dinner and opening party. And, Amelia, this seating plan... It's been three years since they were held in person and every tiny detail must be perfect. It's been called the Oscars of wildlife photography. I think what's also really important for us as a museum is making sure that everything is really sustainable. This year, to add to the pressure, the exhibition accompanying the awards has been completely redesigned. We've been on site now for five weeks and we're in the process now of hanging the artwork in the live boxes. It's a tricky job for specialist fitter Jeff Davis. All of the structure of the exhibition has been built in tulip wood, which is a very sustainable material for this particular exhibition. And the intention is for this to be used in different configurations for the next five years. With around 300 guests soon arriving for the ceremony, Jeff's team are up against it. Yeah, perfect. Among the finalists this year are these remarkable shots of bees mating on a Texas ranch, polar bears foraging for food in an abandoned Russian village, and a ranger comforting a dying gorilla. Sophie has to turn this space into a banqueting hall fit for the great and the good, as well as some of the world's top photographers. But there's barely any time to do it because nothing can start till the museum shuts its doors. We close to the public at six o'clock in the evening and our event starts at 7pm. Everything needs to be planned to an absolute T. Everyone needs to be really well briefed. It really is an absolute task to get this transformed in time. Everything will have to go like clockwork if they're to pull it off. In the gallery above the main hall, Mason is looking for an audience. OK, so I'm back on gallery. I usually like this spot because you get a lot of visitors coming through. I think I'm going to try one of my favourite specimens, the gorilla skull. Usually visitors are drawn to the teeth of the gorilla. You can see here. Huge canines compared to human canines. They are quite terrifying. Would you like to have a look? Yeah, what is it? This is a gorilla. This is a gorilla skull. Ooh. Yeah. Would you like to try to hold it? I can hold the end part here. Wow, it has a big head. Yes. We share about 98% of our DNA with gorillas. So one of our closest living relatives. But as you can see, they are quite different from us. Cool. Yeah, would you like to have a look? It is quite cute, isn't it? Like my boyfriend. Sometimes when it is really quiet in the gallery, I do have a tendency to become hamlet with a skull. It's just a pastime. Sometimes I can draw people in, but again, that's just the... I think you can tell I study drama at university. The rolling hills of Wiltshire may be a lovely spot for a country stroll. But for Sally and Neville Hollingworth, they're a prehistoric landscape just waiting to be uncovered. Pressure on. They're amateur fossil collectors and love to spend their weekends finding and cleaning the treasures they've dug up. That's beautiful. It's got a heart, doesn't it? Yeah. And they're pretty good at it, too. They've turned their living room into a mini natural history museum. These fossils were around when dinosaurs were on our planet. How awesome is that? It was during the pandemic that Sally and Neville really hit the jackpot. After getting permission to search for fossils in a local quarry, they uncovered a spectacular treasure trove of marine creatures that lived a staggering 167 million years ago. Oh, look at that one there. It's beautiful. Absolutely amazing. Beautiful. We soon realised we had something really, really special and it was like a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, a real eureka moment. And it was like a beautiful bouquet of flowers that had revealed itself from this stony tomb. And I'd never seen anything like it. And that's when you said, oh, there's a guy, I'm sure he's still at the Natural History Museum, let's send him some photos. They hoped he'd be able to tell them more. When Dr Tim Ewan saw the pictures, he realised that this was no ordinary discovery. He's been studying marine fossils for over 20 years and had to know more. Tim assembled a team and travelled to Wiltshire to investigate. We're super lucky at this quarry site because it might just look like mud to everybody else, but to me, this is the absolute treasure trove. Remarkably, it turned out this corner of Wiltshire was once at the bottom of a tropical sea. As the dig progressed, Tim and his team unearthed a huge number of ancient sea lilies, urchins and starfish. And then we made a really special, nice, rare discovery. On top of this mound here, we found a fossilised shark's tooth. This is really rare and it's beautiful. It's a really nice find. Tim's hoping there may be even more treasures to be unearthed. Maybe there's some more exciting things that are yet to discover, maybe new species, or other things that we weren't expecting to find, like dinosaurs maybe or marine reptiles. Tim's team, along with Sally and Neville, have so far uncovered thousands of fossils. But there's one big mystery. How did the remains of so many prehistoric sea creatures end up in this part of the Wiltshire countryside? To find out, Tim needs to get the rest of the fossils back to the museum so they can work out why they're here and what happened to kill so many animals, possibly at the same time. The museum's closed, but duty manager Hattie still has work to do. So, last job of the day, I've got to shut the museum doors. First opened in 1881, the museum's been called a cathedral to nature, with four acres of flooring and over 1,400 doors. Very old and creaky doors. Come on. Great. I love doing this. It's my favourite part of the day. I remember being seven years old and coming through these very doors for the first time. And the fact that it's my job to stand here and close them at the end of the day is an absolute dream come true. So, yeah, always happy to do this job. Another great day here at the museum. So, the door's now shut. The general public have left for the day. So, it's our time to take over the hall and get everything set up super, super quickly. It's going to be absolute chaos in here, organised chaos in here for the next hour or so, while the florists come in, the caterers come in, and this amazing set build happens behind me. It's finally here. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards. An army of catering and events staff have just 60 minutes to transform the hall, and it's Sophie's job to get it done on time. Oh, my goodness! I'm so excited! This looks amazing already. It looks so good! I need to get my photo taken in front of it. I can't forget. The 30 tables are now in the hall, and catering manager Benji has to check each setting. We're just laying up dinner at the moment, and then we've set up each table for the number of guests that are sitting on every table. It's a tight, tight operation, getting in and getting everything set up. It's perfect, that's lovely. In the temporary kitchen tucked behind the stage, Chef Arnaud and his team are putting the finishing touches to the food. Tonight, it's a special vegan menu designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible, locally sourced, and with zero waste. So, it's a tartar fin with a celeriac remoulade, salt-baked celeriac, and then a truffle chute to finish it. I think the concept is very exciting. Yeah, it's very, very different. Zero waste. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge, but also very interesting. Good evening! I'll be checking with my colleagues just here. It's nearly seven o'clock, and the first guests are already arriving. So, we opened early. We're three minutes from opening time at the moment, and we've probably already got about 60, 70 guests in the room. The competition winner will be a major news story, and Sophie has to make sure the results don't leak out before they're officially announced at tonight's ceremony. We have an embargo that breaks at 11.30. If we don't hit that, the news of the winners will be announced in the press before it's announced in the room. So, for us tonight, you don't really get to breathe. Up until then, it's going to be all about timings, really keeping it to precision, which is why we've got so many people here tonight, just making sure, we're watching the clock. It's five minutes until the guests sit down, and catering manager Joanna is feeling the heat. I thought I just saw a chair without a seat pad then, but I didn't, so that's all good. The next challenge is to try and get 350 plates out on time to get everyone to enjoy their starters. And just when things couldn't get any busier, the evening's host, Chris Packham, has arrived. I'm very excited to be back here. I love the Natural History Museum with all of my heart. I've been coming here since I was a small child, fascinated by dinosaurs and everything. I've had a long association with this particular competition. I think photography is a great way of, forgive the pun, but focusing people's interests on the natural world. But during, you know, the last 40 years, this competition has transformed. There's a much stronger message. There's a photojournalist element here. So, we don't just see beautiful pictures now, we see important images, images which are conveying the way that we feel about the plight of some of the creatures. And they're not always an easy look. These images should get us to sit up and take note or to marvel and want to protect the natural world. Among the guests is Richard Sabin, the museum's whale expert, and there's one picture that really hit home for him. One of the people that I'm really looking forward to meeting this evening is Richard Robinson, who's taken the most amazing photograph of a southern right whale, and I want to talk to him about that and have that insight through his eyes about that experience, because for me, it would be one of the things I would dream of doing. Good evening. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards are about to begin. Please make your way up the stairs and into Kinsey Hall to take your seats for dinner. They're moving. They're slowly moving. They're, like, shimmying their way down. And then I've got to try and work out how I can run around and beat them. I need to wear, like, racing shoes. The museum is such a maze. The Natural History Museum is in one of the busiest areas of London, and in its grounds is a hidden treasure, a five-acre garden not many people know about, and it's keeping project manager Louise Simmons busy. This garden has been around for over 25 years now, and it's an established wildlife garden with lots of really important habitats. There is a lot of pond life in here. There's dragonfly larvae, there's lots of newts and water beetles, and frogs and toads. There's even a resident family of foxes. This lush green corner of London has had a very unusual past. Initially, it was a delightful Victorian promenade. In the early 20th century, they buried whale carcasses here. Once they had rotted down, the skeletons were added to the collection. And it did sterling work as a dig-for-victory allotment in World War II. Now, it's starting its biggest and most ambitious transformation yet. The Urban Nature Project is making over the museum grounds, so we've got about five acres, and we are making over the East Garden and the West Garden, which is where we are at the moment. It's going to take around 18 months to complete the makeover. And first, head gardener Tom McArthur has some slippery customers to deal with. I'm trying to find as many frogs, toads, newts that we can so we can move to safety. They're draining the existing pond and creating temporary ones. That means that moving all the frogs, toads and newts to safety is critical. Common toads have declined about 70% since the 70s, I think. So, they're really amazing creatures, and people have grown up with them and love them. We want to conserve them as much as we can. Big and meaty, it's a toad. That's kind of what I go on. Oh, look. Can I pick him up? Am I allowed to pick him up? Or should I not touch him? Well, why don't we do it over, and then you can actually let them go. The frogs and toads and newts are probably fine, just actually being released into the ivy. We have a really, really healthy population of them here, and we want to conserve them as much as we can. So, let's put the frogs over there. Watch out, the frog's really hot. They are really slimy as well, aren't they? Yeah. A lot slimier than the toads. Great to be able to reintroduce them to their temporary home while work's happening. So, looking forward to them overwintering and then being able to introduce them back to the new pond. The new pond will be much bigger, and there will also be a stunning walkway for visitors to explore. But it's a delicate business, so to protect the pond life, John Tweddle and his team are keeping close tabs. There are thousands of species that are flying around, crawling beneath the soil, swimming beneath the water. So, we're using the DNA approach here to try and extract DNA from everything in an area. That will give us a much bigger, deeper picture of all of the different groups of wildlife that are there. John and his team have been able to identify some of the pond's tiny residents, including dragonflies, water beetles and pond snails. It's a bit like CSI for animals and plants, really. It's going to be amazing for us, for people to know that we have this, and for people to be using it and learning from it and learning what they can do in their urban environments and their gardens at home. It's incredibly exciting. With 80% of us living in urban spaces, it's a way for visitors to appreciate nature first-hand and to see how it can flourish in our cities. I think they're going to take one. Let's see. Oh! Come on, both. Take both. Yes! See, this is what our hard work's about. I know. And the great thing about this is actually all of the purchases go back to support all the amazing work the museum does. It supports all of the collections, so that makes us feel super proud. And it's amazing to see the kids engaged. Yeah. Tim and his team have begun the mammoth task of examining the thousands of starfish and sea lily fossils dug up in a Wiltshire quarry. They want to find out how they got there and what wiped them out suddenly 167 million years ago. We're still just really scratching the surface and starting to find out some of the details and mysteries that are hidden within these creatures. So it's a really exciting time. To look deeper, Tim is going to scan the finds. He wants to see if there are clues to what happened hidden deep within the fossils. This is one of the thousands we've collected. I'm just going to pop it in this little box and encase it in some foam to stop it moving around. And then I'm going to hand it over to Brett here, who's going to mount it up and put it into this CT scanner. The camera needs to take up to 5,000 pictures of each fossil so that it can be captured in minute detail at super high resolution. After six hours, the results from the CT scan are in. They paint a shocking picture of life and death 167 million years ago. So it's really exciting. None of these animals have their arms or limbs in a position that they would be in life. So this tells us that it's like a sort of death pose and a bit like in Pompeii, where someone's been trying to protect themselves as this ash cloud descended on them. These poor sea lilies have tried to protect themselves from being buried. And what they do when they get buried is they clap their arms shut to try and stop mud getting into the mouth. The evidence from the CT scan shows that they died all at the same time. And from the way the creatures held out their arms to protect themselves, it also suggests a cause of death. They were most likely killed by an underwater mudslide, which would have engulfed the entire colony in an instant. There was no time to escape. And they've discovered something else amongst the fossils, an entirely new species, a new type of prehistoric starfish. This has got an arrangement of plate shapes unlike any other starfish from the Jurassic anywhere else in the world. And so that really excitingly tells us that this is a new species. So it's really exciting because it means we get to describe it and we get to put a name on it. You can even name it after your favourite rock band if you want to. But I think in this instance, they're probably nice to name it after the people who discovered it. So the new starfish will be called Hollingworthia. We just had the luck to be there at the right place at the right time. We've got people in. See you, Tim. After months of preparation, it's almost time to announce this year's award winners. Good evening. Please take your seats. The awards are about to begin. Now, with no further ado, let me introduce your host for this evening, the one and only Chris Packham. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. My name is Chris Packham. I work as a zoologist, a broadcaster, and now essentially an environmental campaigner. But if I'm looking for qualifications to bring me to this stage tonight to present these awards, it's that aged five, I was led by my father through that door and ignoring a small polite notice that said, please do not touch. This finger stroked the fossilised remains of an iguanodon and life has never been the same since. The judges have whittled down the photos from nearly 40,000 entries to just 100, split across 19 categories. In the Rising Star category, these incredible images were taken by a 26-year-old Polish entrant. This year, the winner of our Rising Star Award is Mateusz Piersiak. Once, I spent 16 hours in a small shelter in the middle of the lake just to photograph cranes. And you know what? It wasn't worth it because they didn't show up in the end. But other times, it is worth it and that's what drives me. That's my passion. Enjoy your meal. I'll be back shortly after that to announce the rest of the categories and ultimately our grand title winners 2022. Thank you. As the guests tuck into the main course, Sophie's watching the seconds tick away and praying the schedule doesn't slip. We're about 12 minutes over going into dinner. So it's making sure that everything is ready to hopefully announce the winners before the embargo breaks at 11.30. The museum has one of the largest and most important dinosaur collections in the world. And looking after the nine million items is a highly skilled and never-ending job. In the conservation centre, preparator Kiran is attempting to mend a Triceratops fossil. The bones are quite fragile and I need to kind of piece it back together a little bit. It's from one of the most iconic dinosaurs that ever lived. Triceratops is a very famous plant-eating dinosaur from the late Cretaceous, living around 68 to 65 million years ago. Somewhat similar to a rhino and about the same sort of size and weight as an African elephant. Most distinctive feature of them is the three big horns and the big sort of bony frill surrounding the skull. And we still actually don't really know what the frill was for. Originally, it was thought to be a sort of armour plating to protect the neck from being bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. But we know we've seen puncture marks on the frill from Tyrannosaurus' teeth. So we do know that the Tyrannosaurus could actually bite through this quite easily. It's much more likely to be for mating, to attract a mate. Perhaps these things were quite brightly coloured when they were alive and they were signalling to each other with them. Kieran has to chip, scrape and repair incredibly carefully around the precious fossil. I use a lot of dentist tools in my work because they're really good at scratching away hard material. All sorts of picks, scrapers, things like that. But the trickiest part is lifting it. So colleague Lauren is here to help. One wrong move... Yep. ...and it could shatter. How fragile do you think it is? I think it's very fragile. There's a chance it could break along one of the historic repairs. All right. Thank you very much. You're welcome. The old cement joins held. The rare frill is safe and Kieran can breathe again and take a closer look. That was quite nerve-wracking, but it's quite a relief that this 67-million-year-old fossil did not break on the way up to the workbench. I'm just going to try and manipulate the putty into the cracks using more of my trusty dentist tools. Think of it as polyfiller for a dinosaur fossil. It's quite difficult to manipulate this stuff because it is quite sticky and it will stick to everything. The first part's always the hardest when you do things like this, especially if you haven't done the technique in a while. Here we go. That's looking a bit better. It'll still take me several hours before I'm happy with this, but once I've completed the conservation work on it, I can take it back to the store, return it to the curator, and hopefully they'll be happy with what they see. You know, there's a significant quantity of material in here that has been collected over the past 200 years. Whale curator Richard Sabin has managed to catch up with the photographer Richie Robinson and invited him to see a part of their whale collection that's stored behind closed doors. New Zealander Richie spent several weeks at sea trying to get the perfect shot of the endangered southern right whale. The one that I'd like to show you is this specimen here. From Campbell Island. Campbell Island, right. New Zealand. You can see where the oil is still leaking from the bone. New Zealand's whale population were hunted for their oil through much of the 19th and 20th centuries and very nearly became extinct. The name itself has always fascinated me. Why are they called right whales? And it literally goes back to the whaling days, doesn't it, where the whalers thought that they were the right whale to hunt because they were so easy to approach. There was no mechanism for controlling the numbers that were being taken and, of course, the populations crashed. An estimated 70,000 southern right whales lived in the southern hemisphere in the late 18th century. By the 1920s, there may have been less than 300 left. But down in the southern Tartic Islands, in the Auckland Islands, there was this small population that had survived and the population just slowly started to come back. The fact that they're recovering in numbers is a success story, but it's also a hopeful story because it suggests that the food web that they're a part of and the ecosystem that they live within is healthy and it's growing. The population has come back from 13 females. It's remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. We can just leave them alone. Nature will take its course and they'll come back. Yeah. I would love to have the experience that you had of being under the ocean with that young animal being so close to you. I'd love to get that experience. Well, you know what? I can probably show you a little bit today on a virtual reality headset. Richie used a special camera to capture the experience. Yeah. It's playing. Oh, my goodness. Can you see a whale? Yeah. It is... Oh, it's just... I can't even describe how it feels. It feels like you're actually in the water with the animal. It feels like he's just a few metres away. Yeah. Don't forget to look behind you. If you look towards the little bit, you should see... Oh, wow. Who's that? Is that you? Yeah, so that's me filming it. This is so, so, so very cool. Incredible. Just the curiosity of the animal is amazing, isn't it? I mean, it really is such an immersive experience. I almost feel like I need to hold my breath. This is an incredible thing. How was dinner? It's time for the Headline Awards, including Animal Portraits, Photojournalism and the Grand Prize winners. Ritchie is up for two prizes, including one in a new category, Ocean's The Bigger Picture. The judges chose... Richard Robinson from New Zealand. Ritchie's unique shot of mating southern right whales wowed the judges. There we go. I knew straight away I had something really, really special, maybe something that's not really been photographed before, certainly not that close. It wasn't until I got back and looked at the computer that night that I knew that the image was sharp enough and it was going to reproduce well enough, let alone winning a section in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. My love of photography came from my grandfather. The last few days, I've been thinking, what would he actually feel about me being in London to receive this award, you know? It's been a really emotional journey. The Great British Bee has been a familiar feature of summers in the UK for years. But now they face an uncertain future as half of all British bee species have declined in the last 50 years. At the museum, Dr. Selina Brace is investigating what's going on. Bees have been in decline generally. Many things have changed in the environment. We've had a lot of land use change. We've had the use of pesticides and chemicals. We need a healthy population of bees. Bees are critical, so it is really, really important to protect bees. To help save the bees, Selina's using the museum's incredible bee collection, which spans 130 years and contains over half a million specimens. This is actually really lovely for me, to be here and see the bees out in the draw. The labels tell us who collected the bee, what year the bee was collected, and where the bee was collected. So there's quite a lot of information on these tiny little bits of paper. Many of the bees were donated by amateur collectors who sent them in from all over the world. This one here is Bombus lapidarus, and this is the red-tailed bumblebee. And very pretty, he is, too. To work out why things like pesticide use and climate change affect some bee species more than others, she's studying their DNA. The first step is to collect a sample. Rather than take, like, the whole body or the head, we actually just remove a single bee leg, because, you know, the bee has six legs. So if we've only removed one of them, then you're not losing any of the characteristics of that bee. The surgery is difficult, because some of these bees are older than the museum itself. So, obviously, it's quite tricky to take a bee leg. We don't just remove a bee's knees. We would take this bee leg, pop it in a test tube like this, and then I would take this to the ancient DNA laboratory. To ensure the microscopic samples stay pure, Selina takes extreme measures. Rather than protecting me from anything, it's actually me protecting the bees from me and my DNA. And now I'm ready to go into the ancient DNA lab. The DNA will tell Selina what characteristics of a bee species have made it more or less capable to survive as the world changes. If we know that climate change is going to continue to increase, we can use our understanding of how bees responded in the past to predict how they're going to respond again in the future. It's a long-term project, but in the meantime, there's something we can all do to help our bees prosper. Planting more flowers, things that bees like, making the environment a good environment for bees to flourish in and to be healthy. This is something we all need to think about. OK, it's our final award of the evening. The judges have sifted through nearly 40,000 entries and whittled them down to just 15. But there can only be one winner. Which single photo tells the most original story of our natural world? Our Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022 means we will welcome Corrine Agner to the stage this evening. I would have never imagined the trajectory of my path here. This isn't something I really ever thought could happen. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year event is more than a competition. I never imagined I could be here. So I'm just going to say it. This one's for the girls. So the awards has just wrapped up. I think we made it with about four minutes to spare. So it was a really tight announcement, but we made it and we ensured that Corrine got a lovely moment to talk at the very end. So overall, I think we were successful, a bit close for comfort, but we managed to beat the embargo, which is absolutely fantastic. Finally, Sophie can relax and celebrate an incredible evening. Cheers! Another WP wide up. Cheers. Well done, team. Well done.