The (Other) British Museum

To a dinosaur geek, the British Museum of Natural History is paradise. Low and hulking, the yellow sandstone building covers an entire city block with terra cotta saber-tooth tigers lined up along the roof like ladies in the windows of an Amsterdam cathouse. Sculptured coelacanths and pterodactyls sport in the window bays promising untold pleasures within.


It starts at the entrance—you walk into the toothy grin of “Dippy”, the 100 foot long skeleton of a Diplodocus (Brontosaurus to the rest of us), stretching all the way back to the foot of the grand staircase. Head cocked to one side, seeming to say “and how are you this fine morning?”


The dinosaur gallery walks you through the history of what were the rulers of the planet for nearly 100 million years, showing what was replaced at either end and by whom. The gallery shows how the dinosaurs jump-started their reign when something big happened at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago and how they vanished without a trace when something equally big closed down the Cretaceous.


Subdued lighting casting sharp silhouettes along the walls heightens the sense of a lost world. High ceilings allow the beasts to stand to their full height while an imaginative steel catwalk brings you up to eye level. There is nothing like standing face-to face- with a Tyrannosaurus rex to really appreciate the size and bulk of the thing. It’s one thing to read about a twenty-foot tall creature with teeth like steak knives, and quite another to actually look down into a barrel-sized cuisinart looking back at you.


The museum devotes special attention to Tyrannosaurus rex, everybody’s favorite nightmare. As soon as the scientific world heard about this monster, the Brits sent expedition after expedition to the American west to find, buy, or flat out steal specimens. A hundred years of pouring over the best collection of T. rex skeletons (about 50 total) in the world has provided some astonishing insights and wonderful speculations.


The museum’s curators, using detailed microscopic bone analysis techniques, have shown that Tyrannosaurus life spans were on the order of a human’s. Growth was slow until the animal nearly doubled in size during its teen years. I can just imagine the young T. rex coming home after a hard day on the savannah and clearing out the fridge. The museum has taken advantage of this fact, constructing a life size animated model of a young T. rex, all teen hormones and angst, just hitting its growth spurt and polishing off an after-school snack of Triceratops to the delighted shrieks of school kids.


Not only about fang and claw; the gallery displays fossil and reconstructed eggs and even nests showing dinosaurs to have been attentive and caring parents. They had to be—any number of predators lurked in the Mesozoic brush, eager to convert one species into another. Still, there is an undeniable cuteness in the sight of a clutch of baby parrot beaks just breaking out of the shell as a parent dozes nearby.