London Museum: Goodbye Dinosaur, Hello Blue Whale!
Photo credit: Natural History Museum, London
The grand hall entrance into the Natural History Museum in London has long been guarded by Dippy the Diplodocus, a dinosaur fossil installed in the 1970s.
But a new star is on the horizon. The museum is renovating the entrance by moving the dinosaur and replacing it with a blue whale’s skeleton, a process that could take more than two years.
The swap is not just to wow its visitors. Curators hope the new display will accurately represent the cutting-edge science research taking place behind the scenes.
Photo credit: Natural History Museum, London
“Everyone loves ‘Dippy’, but it’s just a copy,” commented Sir Michael Dixon, the NHM’s director, “and what makes this museum special is that we have real objects from the natural world – over 80 million of them – and they enable our scientists and thousands like them from around the world to do real research.”
The blue whale taking Dippy’s spot is 25 meters long. It was acquired by the museum shortly after its opening in 1881 and currently hangs in the mammals gallery.
The whale was beached on the southeast coast of Ireland. It was not put on public display until 1935.
The remarkable specimen contains every bone, which will be dismantled, cleaned, cataloged, and scanned to create a virtual specimen before being resuspended in the entrance to Victorian Hintze Hall.
Currently hanging horizontally, the new display will show the whale in a diving position.
Photo credit: Natural History Museum, London
“It’s a fantastically complete specimen,” said Richard Sabin. His vertebrates division at the museum will oversee the transfer. “It’s also one of the largest of its kind on display anywhere in the world; and we know its history, we know how it was killed and processed, and that’s quite rare.”
“Just the act of moving it will be great for science because we’ll scan every bone, and that means any researcher will be able to study it and even print 3D parts if they want to.”
So what will happen to Dippy the dinosaur?
Dippy will most likely be displayed in a larger exhibit illustrating how dinosaurs lived in their environment. But he could also go on tour to regional museums in the UK.
Get even more details and photos from BBC News.
