NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON: A Few of Our Favorites

Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton in front of the Natural History Museum, London.

On our recent trip to London, the Natural History Museum was our first stop. The museum is enormous and you can’t possibly see it all in one visit. And even if you do have time, it is best to decide which things to focus on. Our main goal was to see the exhibit of the winners of the yearly photography competition—100 photos selected from more than 4000 entries. We also wanted to revisit some of our favorite parts of the museum.

Blue whale skeleton in Hintze Hall.

We walked to the museum from our hotel near the South Kensington tube stop and entered at the East Gate, where we followed a path through the Evolution Garden to get to the Central Entrance. The museum is free, but we had to line up to go through security. Once inside, the giant skylit space of Hintze Hall loomed before us, with a huge whale skeleton hanging overhead and a grand staircase leading up to a statue of Charles Darwin.

Art with Statue of Charles Darwin.

After paying our respects to Darwin, we stopped at the information booth to pick up a map and get directions to the photo exhibit. The map divides the museum into four color coded zones. We focused on the Green Zone which includes birds, the wildlife photographer of the year gallery, fossil marine reptiles, and treasures of the museum, where we saw the fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx, the first bird.

Caroline with fossil of giant sea reptile collected by Mary Anning.

On our way to the photo exhibit we passed by the amazing display of fossil skeletons of giant marine reptiles, many of them collected by Mary Anning in the nineteenth century. During the Dinosaur Age the oceans teemed with these huge reptiles.

Wild Photographer of the Year Gallery.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year photo exhibit requires a ticket, which we purchased at the entrance. Each photo in the exhibit was backlighted so that it glowed in the partially darkened room and was accompanied by a label with the title, photographer’s name and other pertinent information. What surprised me was not only the diversity of the subjects and locations where they were shot, but the variety of cameras—ranging from specially designed equipment to a simple iPhone.

Photo of moth camouflaged against tree bark--taken with an iPhone.

Having worked with photographers on many of my books, I know how hard it is to get just the right shot. I appreciated a quote mounted on one wall of the exhibit: It is vital to be patient and wait for the moment that completes the story you are trying to tell, even if it takes hours or days or weeks, or sometimes even years. (Akansha Sood Singh, natural history filmmaker)

Models of two dodos. Extinct since 1681 due to overhunting, habitat loss and predation by other animals.

The exit from the photo exhibit was through the museum gift shop where it was possible to buy postcards and books of the images in the exhibit. We then visited the bird room in search of the Archaeopteryx fossil but got sidetracked by a case full of birds that have gone extinct, including the dodo, which once lived on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. Although we found a cast of Archaeopteryx in the bird room, we learned that the actual fossil, one of the most valuable items in the museum’s collection, was upstairs in the room of treasures. So we trudged up the stairs to find it.\

Fossil of Archaeopteryx embedded in limestone. You can see impressions of feathers attached to the wings.

After viewing Archaeopteryx and the other museum treasures it was time to sit down and have some refreshments, which we did in the Central Café behind the stairwell on the main floor. We had seen many of our favorites and been inspired by the photo exhibit. We’ll come back another day to see more.

Main entrance to the Natural History Museum, London.

LONDON IN WINTER: Museums and More, Part 1

British Museum of Natural History, London

Why go to London in January, when it is cold, wet, and dark?  As long as you dress warmly, carry an umbrella, and plan mostly inside activities, it is a terrific time to see this great city when it isn’t jam packed with summer tourists--and there are more exhibits, plays and concerts than you could possibly see in one visit.  We were in London for a week in mid-January, opting to stay in Kensington because of its central location.  Here are some highlights from my diary:

The Cranley Hotel, Kensington, London

Saturday-- We arrived at our hotel, the Cranley, at about 8:30 pm, after walking through light snow from the Gloucester Road tube station. Checked in.  Very genteel--living room with fire and drinks available.  The desk person made a reservation for us for 9:30 at the Bumpkin, a pub about five minutes down the Old Brompton Road.  The dinner was surprisingly good.  Fresh organic food.  Art had a chicken pie and I had squash with brown rice risotto.  We also ordered an onion tart as an appetizer–an artfully presented slab of pastry, red onions, topped with cheese.  We had no room for the sticky toffee pudding on the menu.  Maybe we’ll go back. (We did.)

Statue of Charles Darwin, Museum of Natural History

Sunday– We walked to the Natural History Museum, on Cromley Road, about 10 minutes away and got tickets for the wildlife photography show–100 stunning prize winning nature photos, including a number of penguins photographed underwater by Flip Nicklin (seen in the recent National Geographic.)  On the way to the show we passed the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs found by Mary Anning. [See my post for Feb 11.] After lunch in the museum cafeteria we went to see the statue of Darwin, who presides over the main hall.  At the other end is a giant sequoia slice, brought from CA in the late 1800's, and nearly 2000 years old. That evening we went to a piano concert at Wigmore Hall.

Easter Island Moai

Monday–Took the tube to Kings Cross, walked to a pub called The Driver to see the  Patrick Blanc vertical gardens, then stopped for a Cornish pasty and sausage roll at the station for a late lunch before going to the British Museum.  The entrance hall there is huge, and filled mainly with an enormous gift shop.  First we went to see the Easter Island moai, (made of basalt so the details of the carvings on the back were especially fine).  We then went upstairs to view the mummies, and spent most of our time in just two rooms–all the Egyptian rooms extend across the width of the museum.  Our last stop was to see the Elgin Marbles on the main level.

(Continued next week.)

MARY ANNING's Amazing Fossils at the Natural History Museum, London

"Mary Anning" at the Museum of Natural History, London

In 1811, Mary Anning and her older brother Joseph discovered a strange-looking skull eroding out of the cliffs of Lyme Regis on England’s Dorset coast.  The fossil turned out to be the head of an ichthyosaur, a sea-going contemporary of the dinosaurs.  (At the time the word “dinosaur” had not yet been coined.)  This was the first of Mary Anning's many remarkable discoveries, now on display at the British Natural History Museum in London.

Meeting Mary Anning

On a recent trip to London, I visited the museum, and as I walked along the gallery where Mary Anning’s fossils are displayed, who should I see, but Mary Anning herself!  Of course, it was not the real Mary Anning, who lived from 1799 to 1847, but a character actor, who was delighted to interact with me and other visitors as if we were still in the early 19th century.  For me, this was a special treat, as I had researched Mary Anning’s life and written about her discoveries in two of my books, Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age and Pterosaurs: Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age.

Ichthyosaur fossil, 203 - 194 million years old. Like reptiles that live on land, ichthyosaurs needed to breathe air.  Their nostrils were located in front of their eyes.

Fossil hunting in Britain had its “golden age” in the first half of the nineteenth century.  People collected fossils for fun and profit as well as for academic study.  Mary Anning collected fossils from the rocks along the shore near Lyme Regis and sold them to support her family.  She had little formal education, but an uncanny ability to find fossils.  The ichthyosaur skeleton, and many of Mary’s other finds, were used by leading scientists of the time as a basis for their new theories about Earth’s history.

Ichthyosaur head. The large eye of an ichthyosaur was surrounded by a doughnut-shaped bone called the sclerotic ring.  Large eyes enabled ichthyosaurs to see well in dim ocean depths.

The cliffs at Lyme Regis, on England’s southern coast, are filled with the remains of marine animals that had lived 200 million years earlier, during Jurassic times, when this region was a shallow sea.  When Mary Anning’s brother Joseph first saw the ichthyosaur skull, he thought it was a crocodile.  Later, after a fierce storm washed away more of the cliff, Mary discovered the neck and shoulders of the animal’s skeleton. At the time, she was only thirteen years old.  She and her brother excavated the bones and sold them to a fossil collector from London, who thought they belonged to a giant fish.  At the time, little was known about prehistoric sea reptiles.  It was not until several years later, after similar fossils had been found, that the skeleton was correctly identified as that of an ichthyosaur.  Because these strange animals seemed to be part fish and part reptile, they were given a scientific name meaning “fish lizard.”

Plesiosaur skeleton, 203 - 194 million years old.  Collected by Mary Anning in 1824.

In addition to her discoveries of at least three ichthyosaur skeletons, Mary Anning found fossils of two plesiosaurs and a pterodactyl, as well as numerous fish, ammonites (spiral-shelled mollusks that are ancient relatives of the chambered nautilus), brittle stars, and other marine animals, including many belemnites.  Like squid, belemnites had ink sacs.  One of the belemnites she found was complete with its fossil ink!

Ammonites from Lyme Regis

Mary Anning collected fossils for many of the leading scientists of the day and her work helped develop new ideas about what the world was like in prehistoric times.  As a woman and without a formal education, she was not recognized in her time.  Today, she is given credit for some of the most amazing fossil discoveries ever made.

Recommended book:
I recently read about Mary Anning in the book, Remarkable Creatures: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier.  This fictionalized story of Mary Anning and her relationship with the Philpot sisters who helped promote her work, brings the town of Lyme Regis to life and makes you appreciate the difficulty of fossil collecting and the amazing contribution Mary Anning has made to our understanding of prehistoric life.  The book is also a window on the social and religious conventions of the time and how Mary Anning’s  fossils challenged many of those ideas.