The Natural History Museum

I thought this really deserved a post of it's own. It got almost a whole day of my time, and I doubt I saw half of it.


The dinosaur exibition was pretty impressive, obviously the famous Diplodicus in the entrance hall, but there were many more besides- lots of them were hung above your head which was neat, but you couldn't see them very well, or any signs to tell you what they were. There seemed to be a messanine level where you could have seen them well, but no way to get there, the only stairs I saw were closed due to the T-rex exhibit needing work. The other annoying thing is that it was mostly quite child oriented, so wasn't really intellectually stimulating, it just had coolness value. But still, dinosaurs are pretty cool. They can just be more interesting than they were there.


The Darwin Centre was really cool, it shows some of the research that they do- they've got huge laboratories, and the storage area for samples.
They managed to infuse a lot of the excitement from the breaking-edge science they do in to the museum exhibits. Being able to see in to the labs was nice too, and the miles of corridors of samples... wow. But they're involved in a lot of genetic research, which was interesting. I spent a good few minutes trying to remember what PCR stands for- I did eventually remember! It explained about gels and gene sequencing, it was really quite cool. I even read about how species are classified, which sounds pretty dull. Awesome example specimins did make it more exciting.


Mammels exhibit. Wasn't really that exciting, have to say. I should probably also mention that it was horrifically crowded. The Darwin Centre had been beautifully empty, and a delicious temperature. Again this place was mostly aimed at children.

So I found this awesome monkey sculpture in a hallway, it seems to be made of old bullet cases. There wasn't any sort of sign next to it, so I don't know anything about it, but it I liked it.





This is starting to get long (and a bit expensive- this net cafe is a bit steep) but I have to share one of my more favourite bits of the museum.

I had no idea the Natural History Museum had a jewel collection to rival.... I don't even know what, I'm pretty sure some of those jems are priceless.



















Well that's just some of the rather fabuolous jems in the Museums geology area. Being such a magpie I took hundreds of photos, I'll have to go through and delete a lot of them at some point!

So I loved the Natural History Museum, and I will have to go back and check it out again later.