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the Natural History Museum
one of the most popular of all London's attractions sometimes he gets so crowded
that it can be quite difficult to see the exhibits as closely as you might
wish those are gentlemen the museum is going to be closing in five minutes so
please make your way towards the exit thank you so it's a great treat if
somehow or other you can manage look around but all the other visitors have
gone
some of the creatures here you might if you were lucky have seen in the wild
but there are certain ancient animals that we'll never see with our own eyes
because they're extinct
and among them one or two mysterious not to say suspicious characters that I
would like to examine as they were when they were alive
it's a big place there are 70 million or so specimens here I'm told and the first
I want to look at right now is way up on the very top floor
this some might say is the most scientifically important and valuable
specimen in the whole of the museum it's a fossil called Archaeopteryx and it was
secured for museum by the first director professor richard owen back in 1862
getting it wasn't easy there was a lot of international competition and there
was a certain amount of skullduggery and it certainly cost a small fortune but
what kind of creature was Archaeopteryx when it was alive
it had two long leg boundaries so it must have stood upright a bony tail and
a long neck its head had bony jaws packed with teeth like the reptiles and
its arms had three elongated fingers each ending with a claw so you might
think it was some kind of strange spindly armed upright standing lizard
except for one fat there is evidence of more than just bones on its slab
feathers
Archaeopteryx lived some 150 million years ago long before the appearance of
true birds those feathers on its arms certainly enabled it to glide but that's
not all
marks on the bones show that there were enough muscles attached to them to
enable it to flap not only that a recent standards skull showed that its brain
would have given it the senses and reactions that are needed for accurate
and trouble in the air this feature was half reptile half bird it was the first
proof that in prehistory there were intermediate forms that
linked the big two very different groups of animals that we know today
but while Archaeopteryx could certainly fly it could also clamber up tree trunks
and along the branches like the tree living reptile
thanks to those clawed fingers
there were insects flying around at that time and Archaeopteryx his teeth show
that it was a hunter
and this is Professor Richard Owen the man who acquired that fossil and
built this museum although he disagreed with Darwin's views on evolution he was
one of the great scientists of his time and he had a particular flair for
interpreting fossils in 1839 a huge thigh bone was sent to the museum from
New Zealand Owen deduced from its internal structure
that it must have belonged to a bird if so he must have been a giant the
Mallory's of New Zealand had stories of giant flightless birds that had once
roamed their islands but Europeans had dismissed them as myths but eventually
professor Owen acquired enough bones of these huge birds to put together a
complete skeleton of one of them
this was no myth
the maras in their legend had called it a mower and professor Owen in his
researchers had proved that it once had existed but was it the largest bird that
had ever lived
there were several different species of MOA but this one was the biggest it
stands three meters tall but is this really what it looked like when it was
alive you can tell how an animal holds its head from the junction between the
skull and its neck if that is underneath the skull then its neck would have been
upright but this Miller's neck joint is at the back of the skull so it must have
held its neck more horizontally like this
so was the giant mower the biggest bird that has ever existed well if it crane
up its next it was almost certainly the toys
you might think that such a gigantic bird would have no enemies in the remote
and isolated forests of New Zealand
well there's also a moral legend of a huge predatory bird an eagle that
existed at the same time and what is more there are bones to prove it
this colossal bird was nearly twice as heavy as today's most powerful eagle
bringing down a John Miller must have been a huge task they too were strong
and heavy but the Eagle had powerful eyesight
a beak the size of a butcher's cleaver
and razor-sharp talons as big as the claws of a tiger the Greek for grappling
hooks is half axe and that word gives this bird its name
this is Harper Cornish it was a deadly predator
it was the largest eagle that has ever existed
and it lived in the same forests as the bonus
we know that Harper goddess preyed on mirrors because Mara skeletons have been
found with holes stabbed through their pelvic bones that exactly match the
grasp of the eagle's claws it was probably even strong enough to
cling to a mowers back with one foot while it slashed at its victims neck
with the other
but it looks as if this mower is going to escape for now
as well as its millions of specimens of animals and plants the museum also has
huge and fascinating archives scientific journals from all over the world
letters from explorers even posters and handbills if they have anything to do
with Natural History in the nineteenth century
well professor Owen was in charge of this museum new and extraordinary things
for turning up from all over the world and professor Owen was very keen that
his museum should have the best of them he secured the Archaeopteryx from
Germany of the mowers New Zealand but sometimes really strange things turned
up on his very doorstep and there were certainly lots of very odd creatures
being exhibited around London in Victorian times this print shows an
extraordinary monster that was being displayed in Piccadilly an American
showman called Albert *** was charging a shilling ahead to have a look at it
professor Owen decided to investigate he felt sure that something was wrong with
it but nonetheless he was intrigued and he bought it when he'd got it back to
his museum he was able to examine it in detail
it was certainly gigantic and bigger than anything else he had in his museum
at the time ha the showman had dug up the bones from a farmer's field in
Missouri and maintained that in life the animal had stood nine metres long and
almost 5 metres tall there were claims that this was a fearsome predator that
uses extraordinary tusks for stabbing its victims presumably by swinging its
head sideways well I'm sure professor Owen would have
had something to say about that he must have realized that these blunt rounded
ridges on these huge molar teeth will be very effective at grinding up twigs and
fir cones of both forest vegetation but they lack the sharp blade that you need
to slice through flesh this is not the jaw of a carnivore it soon became clear
that cop had increased the size of his monster skeleton by adding extra
vertebrae ribs and even blocks of wood the Missouri Leviathan was a fraud
so Owen removed all the extra boots and then he put the real bones back together
in their true form finally he detached those astonishing
tusks and put them back in the correct way it seems obvious now but in life
they had pointed in what's the same direction as those of a modern elephant
and so here today stands not *** the Leviathan but Owens Mastodon vegetarian
relative of the elephant that lived 12,000 years ago in North and Central
America it may have decreased a bit in size but
it's still an astonishing animal
our understanding of the mastodons is a lot more accurate today thanks to
Professor Owen
but it was not the only creature in this museum to be the victim of
misrepresentation this poor old bird is a dodo it once lived on the island of
Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and it's almost certainly the first animal
species that human beings actually exterminated in historic times and so
now we talk about being as dead as a dodo but in spite of its fame this one
is a fake its feathers come from a goose its feet are modelled on the turkey and
its beak I suspect is plaster the museum can be forgiven because no skin or
feathers of the dodo survived it's image was influenced by pictures like this one
painted by a 17th century Dutch artist Roland savory but he had never seen a
living dodo and based his image on accounts by seafarers I've often
wondered whether Dodos actually looks like that but unfortunately they'd all
disappeared before anyone who'd get a good look at them
until now
this funny dumpy creature is how the bird is usually represented these days
but I've seen quite a lot of flightless birds over the years and this one
doesn't quite ring true an examination of the way its thighs join its pelvis
has shown that in life it actually stood much more upright we now know that it's
feathers were probably a lot fluffier than in that painting we also now know
that it was related to the pigeon and some experts suggest that it made a
pigeon like all googoo googoo which gave the bird its name probably felt on fruit
there was a lot of it on the island I'll try come on what do you make of that
oh that's a very powerful beat in fact he may well have been adapted for
crushing shells and crustaceans for the sake of the calcium
and there's a female maybe she is another reason why they had such large
beaks to show off with during courtship
here comes a rival male he could be another reason for having a huge beak to
fight with in disputes over nest sites
until now no one has ever seen that don't awake so no one knows how big it
was
laughter tonight who knows
science has revealed the truth behind many a myths and discovered some
creatures that are so odd as to be scarcely believable
but there is one story that is still remarkably persistent back in 1951 a
famous Himalayan Explorer and Mountaineer Eric Shipton came across
some footprints across a high snow field that looked as if they'd been made by
some kind of giant ape Shipton's Sherpa companions had no doubt about what had
made them a Yeti an abominable snowman
well there is one small insignificant looking specimen in the storage vaults
down here that could perhaps explain those prints it was found in a shop in
Hong Kong that sold Chinese traditional medicines
it was the molar tooth of some kind of ape-like creature except that it was
huge the museum has only got a fragment this
is it but here's the cost of a complete one and it's six times the size of one
of ours it was given the name Gigantopithecus giant ape after that
discovery one of two more teeth were discovered but nothing much until
eventually a piece of the lower jaw was found the original is now in America
this is a cast but here is the lower jaw if this animal had a skull with the same
proportions as those of a gorilla its complete skull would have been this big
this was a true monster
so we know a huge ape did exist which I can't empathise he could well as good
three metres tall which case it would have been eight times as heavy as I am
in the fear as heavy as that you don't spend much time time being fierce cuz
they won't support you so the likelihood is that his arms wide and he walked
upright
and a bright animal has its head on the top of that spire as I do and if that
hand is to be well balanced it's better not have a long muzzle but a rather flat
face so if I were to observe dr. Pincus and it stared back at me I suspect I'll
find it look familiar
Gigantopithecus is commonly thought to have died out several hundred thousand
years ago but sightings of the Yeti continue to be reported so is it
possible that some kind of giant ape maybe even Gigantopithecus itself still
survive somewhere out in those remote Himalayan mountains
the Gigantopithecus tooth isn't the only intriguing assessment down here in the
storerooms this a piece of dung looking at it you might think it had dropped to
the ground and yesterday it was found in the cave in Patagonia and with it piece
of skin like this covered in a very coarse miss Lee here and on the
underside mysterious white bone or toes those kind of armor no known creature
alive today as armored hide like this if it still survived it will be a truly
extraordinary discovery so at the end of the 19th century explorers and
scientists started a search for it
in fact the dung and the fur appeared to be recent only because they'd been in
effect freeze-dried in that ancient cave the creatures themselves had died out
some ten thousand years ago but explorers did find their skeletons they
were giant sloths that lived not in trees as modern ones do but on the
ground and this one had immense claws
what could it have used him for
these come says probably spent most of their time on all fours but nonetheless
they were perfectly capable of hearing up on their hind legs published about
three meters tall which is as tall as a busily bear if not taller but I don't
think this one is going to use its claws on me that dung made it clear that these
creatures are vegetarians so they doubtless use those claws for ripping up
plants but it's been discovered recently that
they use them for something else as well
something that seems rather surprising the animals of their great bulk
they dug burrows
huge excavations like this have been found all over Patagonia and we know
they were made by John Smith's because scratches on the walls of the burrows
exactly match their claws such immense burrows must have been excellent places
to take refuge and the Giants tooths may well have had need of them because there
was a truly ferocious predator living alongside them
a great cat with immense saber shaped teeth Smilodon for me there is no more
alarming animal in the whole museum than this and that skeleton is perfectly
preserved because about 10,000 years ago it wandered into a pool of naturally
occurring tar in California in general shape it was somewhat like a lion but
more muscular and much heavier and those saber teeth for really sharp
no wonder the giant sloths needed burrows in which to take refuge
you might think that Smilodon would have caught its prey as a lion often does by
chasing it leaping on it at speed and then throttling it suffocating it with a
bite to the neck
but smile at all stored it spray creeping quietly across the plains until
he got really close and then it pounced
Smilodon couldn't bottle its prey with those huge teeth and they were too
brittle to slash they would shatter if they struck bone
instead the animal would have first used its great weight to pin down its victim
then it could have used its sabers like blades to slice open the soft flesh of
its victims throat
but these terrifying hunters had a rather touching side to their characters
Tigers today are solitary hunters and when one gets too old to hunt
successfully it dies but skeletons of really elderly sabertooths have been
discovered which suggests that not only did smile at on hunt in packs
but when members of the family were too old to hunt for themselves they were
allowed to take a share of the kill
the museum is full of creatures that appear terrifying but which no doubt if
you knew the matter would prove to have quite a charming side to their
characters but there is one here that would I think kill everyone's blood
this is a *** birth from the backbone of a modern snake it was a Python and we
know exactly how long it was because it was measured when it was alive it was 21
feet long 7 meters this is a similar bone from the spine of a fossils sake
and if this was 20 feet long how big was this certainly 30 feet 10
meters 11 meters it was a monster but what did live on in those far distant
times
maybe if I follow it I'll find out what it ate
science calls this snake giganto fees and it was truly immense certainly big
enough to swallow me but would it have eaten human beings
it might well have done if we had both been around at the same time but it
lived 40 million years ago and had become extinct long before human beings
appeared on earth so maybe it preyed on dinosaurs
well now dinosaurs are even older than giganto fees and disappeared some 25
million years before it evolved
in that case what about mammals such as sheep or deer
no at least not modern mammals like these the early mammals are rather
different from the kind through no today
this is a model of a prehistoric elephant that was unlucky enough to
wander about the planet at exactly the same time as giganto fees about 40
million years ago
but how could giganticus tackle one of these well he didn't use venom to kill
its prey
we know from its massive size that it must have been a constrictor
constrictors having seized an animal with their jaws wrap their coils around
their prey and squeeze so hard they stopped their victims heart and it dies
within a few minutes I wonder if you realizes that is dinner tonight is a
fiberglass mold I'll leave him to it
there are specimens of animals here from every corner of the earth
but it was much closer to home on the south coast in Dorset that a group of
amateur Victorian fossil hunters discovered these amazing fossilized
creatures but what kind of animals were they they clearly lived in the sea
because seashells are found alongside them in the rocks they had bony paddles
not fins like fish and huge eye is protected by a ring of plates those
Victorian pioneer scientists led by Professor Richard Owen worked out that
they were too old to be mammals and was certainly not fish they were reptiles
Owen and his friends call them a sphere sores fish lizards
now it's got skin and flesh on it you can see how remarkably similar it is
to today's dolphin it's got the same streamlined silhouette same pointed jaws
they're breathing even gives birth to live young but surely an ancient atheist
all couldn't be as advanced as a modern-day dolphin or could it
don't sins are mammals if this was reptiles very very different groups
they're not at all closely related and yet they both have very similar body
shapes they're a remarkable example of what's called convergent evolution two
groups of unrelated animals that have evolved similar bodies to suit the same
environment but there are some differences don't fins beat their tails
up and down like their cousins the whales if their source as is clear from
their fossils had tails like fish the beat from side to side and dolphins only
have two flippers whereas if the source had four so is it possible that Ethier
soars well as fast of the water and as agile as dolphins if not more so I
wonder who would win in the competition
one kind of dolphin spinners can leap from the surface of the water and spin
in the air
maybe the ether swords can do the same
we know that each their sores lived and evolved on this planet for many millions
of years more than dolphins have done so far so maybe if thea sores would have
won the competition of who knows
while the ether sauce and other marine reptiles ruled the Seas a hundred and
fifty million years ago another group of reptiles dominated the land
they lived long before big mammals let alone human beings there were hundreds
probably thousands of different kinds and they came in all shapes and sizes
they are perhaps the most famous and dramatic of all prehistoric creatures
and they were first identified and named here in Britain they were the dinosaurs
thousands of people come here every day to look at their amazing skeletons and
to imagine what they must have looked like and sounded like when they were
alive
it's hard to imagine a time when the world didn't know about dinosaurs but
until relatively recently nobody knew they had ever existed let
alone that they once ruled the world
the story of their discovery starts in the 1820s
when a doctor named Gideon Mantell living on the south coast of England in
Sussex picked up something odd in a sandstone quarry and this is what he
found it's clearly a tooth of some kind this is its outer surface and in shape
it's very like the tooth of a living lizard such as an iguana which is why
the Allen walk he belonged to have came to be called Iguanodon iguana tooth
and with it were a number of other burners they were the hips and back legs
of some kind of giant reptile more of them were discovered and soon there were
enough to get some idea of what the whole animal had looked like one odd
little bone seem to have nowhere to go so the reconstruct was put it on the end
of its nose making the animal look like some kind of reptilian rhinoceros it was
like nothing anyone had ever seen before
so a great fossil hunt started in the chorus of Sonic's and eventually the
bones of several different kinds of big animals were discovered they were
brought here to the museum professor Owen examined them and he decided that
they should belong to a completely new kind of animal and what he called a
dinosaur terrible lizard in due course more complete skeletons of iguanodons
were discovered and it became possible to reconstruct them with greater
certainty
Iguanodon could stand upright it had small arms and was over 25 feet 7 meters
tall and that horn on its nose was actually a spike on its thumb
before long new and even bigger species were being unearthed all over the world
from the instantly recognizable three-horned Triceratops to the
sensational Tyrannosaurus Rex these astounding beasts have inspired and
captivated not only scientists but writers artists and filmmakers for
almost two centuries but it was professor Owen here in the Natural
History Museum who first identified them and his work has been continued here
ever since
this is the laboratory where the museum prepares its fossils to study and for
display
it's here that they painstakingly remove the excess rock to reveal the fossils in
all their extraordinary detail this is the fossilized egg of a dinosaur one of
the first to be discovered and it was found close to some bones
I was sauropod dinosaur sauropods this is the model of one were gigantic
vegetarian dinosaurs that wandered around on four legs there are lots of
different species of them they're found all over the world and they're the
biggest land animals that have ever existed of course you can't prove that
it was a sauropod the laid this egg but I would like to think that it was the
weight of the sand that eventually covered it squashed it but if we could
see it when it was first laid we would see that it's much rounder than a
chicken's egg more like that of a turtle or a crocodile and of course very much
bigger hmm sounds like something's in there but how will that something make
its way out most dinosaur eggs are shell filled with rock but not so long ago
someone in South America found a sauropod egg and inside there was a baby
sauropod and on its nose it has a little egg tooth birds and crocodiles have the
same sort of thing they need it as a sauropod did in order to be able to
break out of the shell
we know that baby sauropods are very small and left their nests very early
perhaps to avoid being trampled upon by their huge mothers they probably hid in
the forest until they do large enough to join the herd of adults
but this is just one leg bone of a fully grown sewer port so you can see this
little fella has got quite a lot of growing to do with an excuse
the museum of course has the skeleton of a fully grown sauropod of a kind and its
story is one of Kings and millionaires
back in 1902 King Edward the seventh then the Prince of Wales saw a picture
of a huge sauropod replica one of the biggest yet discovered whilst visiting
the Scotsman turned American millionaire Andrew Carnegie at his castle in
Scotland the Prince immediately said well I would like one of those and in
those days what Prince's asked for they got
and so in due course another replica turned up right here in the Natural
History Museum
and here it is there are two ways of pronouncing a scientific name
it's either Diplodocus or Diplodocus either way it's a bit of a mouthful so
I'm going to use the nickname that is commonly used around here
this is dippy and once more although there's no way of being sure whether it
was male or female I'm going to assume that dippy was female but what did dippy
look like when she was alive
this strangely-shaped fragment of a dinosaur called edmontosaurus was
mummified before it was fossilized so not only the bones but the skin was
almost perfectly preserved and it was covered in small scales
they didn't overlap like those of a lizard but formed a close-fitting mosaic
maybe dippy was like that too but what about her color my suspicion is that
dippy like many large mammals today such as elephants or an ostrich was a general
all-over neutral plain color so if we add a little bit of skin and flesh we
can get some idea of what she actually look like
so now after 150 million years we've got a pretty good idea of what did not die
but how did she behave
well animals her size and weight must have moved in a rather ponderous way and
in any case since use a vegetarian as we know from her teeth she had no need to
be speedy to get her food but it's the tiny bones in dippers inner ear that can
give us a clue as to what she sounded like these little bones are basically
the same shape as that of the dinosaurs closest relatives birds the rays of
sounds our bird hears is related to its size the small bird makes and hears high
pitch sounds whereas large birds communicate with low pitch sounds so
huge dippy with her inner ear bone shaped like those of a bird could
probably hear very low pitched frequencies of sound and she could
probably make them too
we know that elephants today can communicate using infrasound sound with
sequences solo they're below human hearing and those sounds traveled
through the ground sometimes for many miles and are detected by elephants
through their large flat sensitive feet
dippie - at large flat feet so maybe the giant dinosaurs communicated with one
another in much the same way as well as by bellowing and those may not have been
the only noises the Dybbuk could make
some scientists think that because of the length of the tail and the way the
joints work she might have been able to crack it like a whip
the muscular strength that enabled her to hold her tail above the ground meant
that she could if necessary use it as a weapon
her tail would have helped to balance her long heavy neck but why was that so
long it used to be thought that she lived in rivers and needed her next to
break the surface in order to breathe but that can't have been true because if
her body was submerged the pressure of the water would have crushed her lungs
the most likely explanation seems to be that her huge neck helped to reach vast
quantities of needs sweeping it from side to side she could cover a larger
grazing area she could also push ahead between forest trees to reach firms and
other ground vegetation but in order to reach the highest most succulent leaves
in the forest it seems likely that dippy would have reared up on her hind legs
London's Natural History Museum is full of wonders it's a place where we can get
a vivid idea of the great variety of life that inhabits our planet both today
and in the past especially after night like that
you