So from South Kensington tube, we followed the underground directions to the Natural History museum, walking past a branching turn-off to the Science Museum. Only, when we actually came out on the surface, there was a sign to the Natural History Museum for wheelchairs and pushchairs which directed us back towards the Science Museum.

Now, I understand it might be expensive to add lifts and ramps and stuff, but really, adding an extra line to the sign suggesting that if you have a pushchair or a wheelchair, you might be better off going this way is hardly going to bankrupt anybody, is it?

Anyway, we made our way into the Natural History Museum (NHM from now on!) to discover we’d entered via the “Earth” section. This was great for the kiddies because there was pictures of volcanos and stuff (and as BTP loves and is terrified by them in equal measure, this was good fun), and a room where the floor wobbles to simulate being in an earthquake, while nearby things rattle on shelves. Cool.

There was some display about rocks, or erosion, or such like where there were examples of various different things showing signs of weathering. Only the kids are really a bit young for wanting to understand the difference between tidal erosion, freeze/thaw weathering and other such things, so instead when they encountered a sandstone gargoyle it was felt that this should be put to use to form a face-pulling competition.

Our gargoyle is the one on the right.

Shortly after the gargoyles, there was something to do with packing things down — I’m can’t exactly remember what the purpose of the exhibit was, other than to show that it’s easy to squash down a loosely packed volume of small things than the same volume of large lumps — which provided more entertainment, ‘cos if you pushed the handles up and down fast, the water inside would slosh about.

And they say kids today aren’t interested in nature and science and stuff. Well, not at that age they ain’t, anyway, but give them a button to press, or a handle to move up and down, and you can keep them happy for hours…

Obviously we’d not come to the NHM to look at rocks and stuff, however. We’d come to look at dinosaurs and so needed to make our way through to the Central Hall (in other words, the bit we would have come in at had the main entrance been wheel-friendly).

On the way down to the central hall we passed a remarkable collection of birds, including some imposing looking Griffin Vultures and some Dodos which caused the subject of extinction to crop up, as BTP quite sensibly pointed out that I couldn’t say there “weren’t any Dodos any more” because look, there were two of them in that glass case over there. Which was a fair point.

Past the birdies then took us to the room of fishy dinosaurs where there appeared to be a wall full of Icthyosaur and Plesiosaur fossils, along with what I remembered distinctly as being a giant ground sloth (and when I say giant, I mean giant — a live one would weigh five tons and reach twenty feet high when standing on its hind legs) called a Megalotherium. Only when I went back to look it up, apparently it’s called a Megatherium.

Strangely however, an online article from a 1911 version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica says…

MEOATHERIUM (properly Megalotherium) , a huge extinct edentate mammal from the family Megatheriidae (or Megalotheriidae), and by far the largest representative of the Edentata.Online Encyclopedia

So it does appear that it used to be called the Megalotherium. Does anyone know why they stopped calling it that? Either way however, it’s quite an imposing set of bones.

But of course, that wasn’t really the dinosaur we’d come to see. Nope, we wanted to visit the dinosaur gallery, although were somewhat put off by the huge serpentine queuing system and the sign at the back of the queue which said “approximate waiting time from here: 1 hour”. I suspect myself and the GLW would have been happy to say “bugger that” and wander off, but it’s all about the kiddies, isn’t it, so we took our place in the queue.

I’m happy to report that it only took about 20 minutes to wind our way through the queue into a dimly-lit dinosaur gallery. I can only presume stronger light would have a detrimental effect on the fossils (either that or they didn’t want people getting decent photos, to give them the opportunity to sell more dinosaur stuff at the shop).

I managed to get a few reasonable photos – a triceratops skull, a Tyrannosaur skull from underneath so you can just see lots and lots of big teeth and so on, which have duly been printed and passed on to BTP to take into school to terrify classmates with. However, despite the fossils being the remains of actual, once were real live dinosaurs, they didn’t impress the kids so much, because basically they weren’t dinosaurs, they were just bones.

Fortunately they had an (I presume almost life-size, but maybe a little smaller) animatronic T Rex in one of the rooms which would move its head and roar and snarl and look as if it was going to bite you. Fantastic.

BTP was a little scared of this at first, but by the time we’d walked all of the way around it, he’d decided for himself that it wasn’t a real one, because otherwise it would have been able to get out and bite people.

After that, there was just time to go and see all the insects in the insect gallery bugzone thingy (spiders, scorpions, bugs, mites, ants, crabs and all manner of small things which were disappointing by their non-dinosaurian nature), grab a cup of coffee and then head of back to the hotel, as we were fair knackered, and besides, we’ve still got to negotiate steps on the way out…

This meant that we didn’t actually make it as far as the science museum, which was a disappointment because I’d always enjoyed that as a kid (big trains and stuff, and most importantly for the childhood museum seal of approval loads of buttons to press), but we could maybe do that another day, or even just miss it out.

Because tomorrow, we were off to the zoo.