Natural History Museum

The main hall, I love this building!

I went back to the Natural History Museum the other day, mainly to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.  A combination of two of my loves, photography and animals, so I was definitely looking forward to that.  You can't take any photos of the photos, I hate that rule, but you can see the winning photos online here.  There were a variety of different categories, but it seemed that some of the photographers were taking a bit of an easy way out by taking extremely similar photos and then submitting them for different categories, which I thought was a bit dodgy.  Some of the shots were incredible, and the photos by children were pretty amazing, and these were often just taken in their backyard.  Which goes to show you don't need to travel for miles to take good shots. 

I think the Natural History Museum has to be one of my favourite buildings, though I think they could spend a little more time on the display labels.  There's actually quite a

Standing guard at the entrance to the dinosaurs

big difference between the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, and whilst I think they both have great stuff in them, it just seems that the British Museum has a lot more money to be able to spend on explaining the different displays.  Everything in the British Museum has a detailed explanation, whereas most of the stuff in the Natural History Museum, just has a name plate.  The stuff that does have a more detailed description looks like it was last updated in the 1960's.

The museums here in Britain are all free, and it makes me wonder where do they get the money to prepare any exhibits, is it purely government funded, or do they rely heavily on donations?  And if that is the case how is it that the British Museum has so much more money than the Natural History Museum?  Are they just better at pulling in the donations?  They would certainly get more visitors, but then you wouldn't think the average-joe visitor would actually donate all that much. 

A little guy casting shadows

Anyway it seemed a little quieter at the Natural History Museum this time round, so I thought I would try their dinosaur exhibit, by far their most popular, permanent exhibit.  It was certainly pretty good, they had a lot of complete skeletons, and quite a bit of general dino info.  They also talked a bit about how they couldn't really be sure of much, and the different evidence leading to why they think they were cold-blooded, or warm-blooded, or why they died out.

T-Rex and Triceratops skulls

The strangest thing about the exhibit though is the way it is structured.  It is very much a one way path, you walk in, up some stairs, and then you walk along an elevated walkway over all the exhibits, past skeletons, until you get to the very back of the room.  You see a sign saying T-Rex, so you think, oh cool they have a T-Rex skeleton, it's strange that it's behind a wall, but fair enough.  You then walk around the wall, and you find you are on a ramp, leading back down to the ground.  And it's not a T-Rex skeleton, but a strange animatronic T-Rex, which I assume was life-size, but it was hard to tell.  And I'm thinking, why are we all forced to go past this thing?  I mean it was a major crush up on the walkway, and if it was only leading to this weird robotic thing, then I would gladly have skipped the crush and the robot, and focused on the rest of the exhibit.

Freaky alien model

After the dinosaurs, the other exhibits seem a bit half-hearted, I think they sunk all their donation money into the robot.  I checked out the human body section, which looked like it was last updated 40 years ago.  I have to say the highlight here was the 80x scale model of a foetus, that thing looked like an alien!