My first visit to London’s Natural History Museum must have been at the age of seven or eight accompanying my parents and younger sister and so is only a rather distant memory. I do recall the imposing and blackened skeleton of a giant sauropod that greeted me on entering the massive front doors of the main building but what also struck me at the time was just how many ‘taxidermed’ animals could be stuffed into row upon row of glass cases
When I took my own children just recently things could not have been more different. The Diplodocus still stands guard, but all those arrays of dusty species seem to have been tucked out of sight and replaced with a much more lively and fun view of natural history with all kinds of hands-on and multimedia exhibits and galleries.
Read on: scientific research in the past
