My visit of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition over, I found myself in the Museum Shop standing amongst toys, books, and souvenirs.
Exit the shop and I’m back in the corridors of the Natural History Museum surrounded by school children, hundreds and hundreds of them. It was like they’d spawned in the hour I’d been in the exhibit. Squealing and jostling, chattering and giggling, filling the wooden halls and windowed ceilings with their raucous noise.
Moving in packs were the high schoolers, faces buried in their phones, occasionally grunting at each other, looking bored and unimpressed. Collapsed on the side pews were exhausted parents and grandparents, clutching prams and pushchairs, bags and water bottles, wrangling tantrum-throwing toddlers.
Oh dear. There was really no escape. So, as they say, if you can’t beat ’em, then join ’em. Now, where are those dinosaurs?
Actually, they’re pretty easy to find. Many of the fossils line the walls and dominant each corner.
But to really see the best of them you need to find the Dinosaur gallery. Here, the museum curators have built a winding path of fossils and interactive featurettes, and crammed them into one long hall. You’ll find the bigger dinosaurs hung from gantries overhead and the smaller ones in glasses boxes. There’s lots of educational information along the way and they’ve added a couple of animatronic versions – one of a giant, scary T-Rex and another of two smaller, furrier, and cuter dinosaurs.
Here’s just a small selection of what you’ll see.
I then found the Mammal hall, with it’s huge blue whale and suspended whale bones. Again it was crowded with school children.
You’ll find the rest of my photos in my London Summer 2017 Flickr Album (keyword search ‘Natural History Museum’).
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