Geology museums of Britain: The Natural History Museum, London (Part 1) – what should a great museum show?
Jon Trevelyan (UK)
A museum like no other
This is the first part of a two-part article on the Natural History Museum in London. And there are few museums whose buildings announce their ambitions quite as emphatically as this museum does. Approaching from Cromwell Road, Alfred Waterhouse’s great Romanesque building looks less like a conventional museum, than a cathedral dedicated to the natural world. Towers, arches and ranks of terracotta ornament cover the immense façade, while animals and plants – living and extinct – form part of the decoration. Even before entering, the visitor is being told what this institution is about (Fig. 1).
It is also immediately apparent that this is no quiet, specialist museum. The queues outside can be substantial and the entrance halls crowded. More than seven million people visited during 2025, making the Natural History Museum the most visited attraction in the United Kingdom. That popularity is important, because this article will question some aspects of the way in which the museum presents its collections. Whatever reservations one might have about particular galleries, this is emphatically not an institution struggling to attract the public.
The familiar Waterhouse frontage is only the public face of a much larger institution. The museum is simultaneously a visitor attraction, an international research centre, and the custodian of more than 80 million specimens. Only a minute proportion of those collections can ever be placed on public display – a point to which we shall return later.
The natural-history experience now extends beyond the building itself. The recently transformed gardens incorporate planting, recreational areas and geological and palaeontological objects (Fig. 2). For example, two enormous ammonites sit near the Garden Kitchen Café, turning fossils into part of the landscape through which visitors approach and enter the museum.
Nearby stands something very different. ‘Fern’ is a life-sized bronze Diplodocus, inevitably recalling the famous cast of Diplodocus carnegii – ‘Dippy’ – that occupied the Central Hall for more than a century before being replaced by the blue whale skeleton in 2017. Fern is not a fossil and makes no pretence of being one. It is a bronze reconstruction, intended to give an extinct animal a physical presence that isolated bones cannot always provide (Fig. 3).
Other objects outside the museum connect the present institution much more directly with its Victorian beginnings. Particularly striking are the fossil tree trunks from Craigleith, near Edinburgh. One was erected outside the museum in 1887, only a few years after the new building opened, and generations of visitors have passed it on their way inside (Fig. 4).
Those first few objects encapsulate much of what makes the Natural History Museum unusual. Before entering the main galleries, the visitor has already encountered architecture, fossils, reconstruction, scientific history, and recreation. Inside, the range becomes greater still.
The museum consequently faces demands that its Victorian founders could scarcely have anticipated. It must preserve collections of international scientific importance and make them available for research. It must accommodate millions of visitors, including children and school groups, and explain enormously complicated subjects to people arriving with very different levels of knowledge. General admission is free, while the building and collections are expensive to maintain.
There is much that works exceptionally well. The building remains magnificent, the collections are extraordinary, and some galleries display them with great confidence. Modern interpretation can also make difficult scientific ideas accessible, particularly to younger visitors.
But walking through the museum raises a question that will run throughout this article. For someone who comes principally to see natural-history objects, there are places where screens, models, graphics and explanatory material appear more prominent than the specimens themselves. Elsewhere in the same museum, a great fossil, mineral or skeleton demonstrates how little assistance an exceptional object may need to command attention.
This is not simply an argument between an old-fashioned museum and a modern one. A case packed with poorly explained specimens may communicate very little to anyone without specialist knowledge. Conversely, subjects such as earthquakes or plate tectonics cannot be adequately explained merely by placing an object in a cabinet. Interpretation is essential.
The question is one of balance: how should one of the world’s greatest natural-history museums divide its limited public space between the objects in its care and the interpretation needed to understand them? What should it select, how should it explain those selections and, ultimately, what should a natural-history museum show?
Those questions are not as modern as they sound. They reach back to the creation of the museum itself. More than 160 years ago, Richard Owen was already wrestling with the problem of how an enormous natural-history collection could be made intelligible and accessible to the public.
Therefore, to understand the museum we see today, we need first to understand the museum Owen wanted to build.
The museum Richard Owen wanted
The Natural History Museum did not begin at South Kensington. Its origins lie in the British Museum and, more particularly, in the enormous collection assembled by the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane. Following Sloane’s death in 1753, Parliament purchased his collection for the nation, and it became one of the foundations of the British Museum, which opened to the public in Bloomsbury in 1759.
Natural history was, therefore, part of the British Museum from the beginning. However, during the following century, its collections expanded enormously, as specimens arrived through exploration, collecting, purchase and donation. At the same time, geology, zoology, botany and palaeontology were developing rapidly as scientific disciplines. The British Museum had to accommodate books, manuscripts, antiquities, works of art and natural history, and the available space became increasingly inadequate.
Into this increasingly congested institution came Richard Owen. Owen was already one of Victorian Britain’s leading comparative anatomists and palaeontologists. He had studied animals brought back by Charles Darwin from the voyage of the Beagle, described numerous living and extinct organisms and, in 1842, introduced the name Dinosauria. In 1856, he became Superintendent of the natural-history departments of the British Museum (see box: Richard Owen – scientist, controversialist and museum-maker).
| Richard Owen – scientist, controversialist and museum-maker |
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| Few scientists are more closely associated with the Natural History Museum than Richard Owen (1804–1892). A comparative anatomist and palaeontologist of formidable ability, Owen described numerous living and extinct animals, and in 1842 coined the name Dinosauria for the remarkable fossil reptiles then being discovered in Britain. He was also a powerful and controversial figure. Owen could be fiercely competitive, and his disagreements with Thomas Henry Huxley became particularly bitter. His opposition to Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection placed him on the other side of one of the great scientific debates of the nineteenth century. Later accounts have consequently sometimes concentrated on Owen’s disputes and toxic personality, at the expense of his considerable scientific achievements. However, for the history of the Natural History Museum, his importance is difficult to exaggerate. Owen campaigned vigorously for a purpose-built museum, where the expanding natural-history collections could be properly housed, studied and made accessible to the public. The result was the great museum at South Kensington. Construction began in 1873 and the building opened in 1881. Owen, therefore, did considerably more than contribute to the collections eventually displayed there: he helped formulate what the new institution was intended to be. There is a pleasing historical irony in its central hall. Owen’s statue once occupied the prominent position on the main staircase. Since 2009, that position has been occupied by Charles Darwin. Owen has moved elsewhere in the museum, but Darwin now surveys a building, whose existence owes a great deal to his old scientific opponent. |
Owen became convinced that the national natural-history collections required a purpose-built home. His argument went beyond the practical problem of overcrowding. He envisaged an institution in which specimens could be conserved and studied, while also being made accessible to a much wider public. The new museum would, therefore, have both scientific and educational purposes.
Creating the new museum was neither quick, nor straightforward. It required substantial public expenditure and political agreement, but the debate was also about what such an institution should be. The problem was not simply where to store an expanding collection. It concerned the relationship between scientific collections and a museum intended for the public.
Owen’s ambitions were considerable. He wanted sufficient space for the collections to continue growing and for visitors to encounter the diversity of the natural world on a scale impossible at Bloomsbury. But that ambition created another problem. An enormous collection might be scientifically invaluable, while remaining almost incomprehensible to a visitor confronted by thousands of unfamiliar specimens.
How Owen proposed to deal with that problem – through his proposed ‘Index Museum’ – is important enough to consider separately in the next section. First, however, the museum needed a building.
In 1864, a competition for its design was won by Francis Fowke. Fowke died the following year and the project eventually passed to Alfred Waterhouse, who substantially developed and altered the design. Construction began at South Kensington in 1873.
Waterhouse made extensive use of terracotta, a material well suited to the polluted atmosphere of nineteenth-century London. But he transformed a practical building material into one of the museum’s defining characteristics. Animals and plants populate the façades, arches and internal decoration, so that natural history became part of the building itself. Even the distinction between living and extinct organisms was incorporated into the scheme, with extinct forms concentrated principally on the east side and living forms on the west.
The museum opened to the public on 18 April 1881, although transferring the vast collections from Bloomsbury continued afterwards. The natural-history departments of the British Museum at last possessed a monumental building created specifically for them.
Owen had won his museum, but one of the most conspicuous reminders of his achievement today, however, involves somebody else. At the head of the great staircase sits Charles Darwin. Joseph Boehm’s marble statue of Darwin was unveiled in 1885, but the position later passed to a statue of Owen. Darwin returned to the staircase in 2009, during celebrations marking the bicentenary of his birth and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species (Fig. 5).
The symbolism is irresistible, but it should not be taken too far. Scientific history is rarely a simple contest between heroes and villains. Owen opposed Darwin’s explanation of evolution by natural selection, but he also made major contributions to comparative anatomy and palaeontology, and played a fundamental role in creating the institution over which Darwin’s statue now presides.
More importantly for our purposes, Owen was already confronting the problem that remains at the centre of this article. A museum may possess an enormous collection, but its visitors have limited time and widely differing levels of knowledge. Somehow, those specimens must be selected, arranged and explained.
The great building at South Kensington provided the space. Deciding what the public should see – and how they should understand it – was a different problem. For that, Owen had another idea.
A museum built to explain nature
Richard Owen had secured something remarkable: a vast building devoted specifically to natural history. But simply transferring the collections from Bloomsbury into larger galleries would not fulfil his ambitions. The new museum also had to help the public understand what it contained.
That presented an obvious difficulty. Scientific collections grow by accumulation and comparison. Closely related animals, repeated examples of the same fossil and numerous varieties of a mineral may be extremely valuable to researchers, but potentially bewildering to a visitor without specialist knowledge. A scientifically useful collection and an intelligible public display are not necessarily the same thing.
Owen’s proposed solution was a hierarchy of display. At its centre was what he called the Index Museum, intended for the great Central Hall. Carefully selected specimens would introduce visitors to the principal divisions of the natural world. Those wanting to explore a subject further could then continue into the specialist galleries beyond. In modern terminology, it was an orientation gallery (see box: Owen’s Index Museum – what should a museum display?).
| Owen’s Index Museum – what should a museum display? |
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| The question of how much a natural-history museum should display is not new. Richard Owen was wrestling with it before the Natural History Museum had even been built. His plans included an Index Museum in the Central Hall. This would contain carefully chosen specimens, illustrating the principal divisions of the natural world and provide visitors with an introduction to the much larger specialist galleries beyond. Someone with little knowledge of natural history could, therefore, begin with a comprehensible overview, before exploring particular subjects in greater depth. However, Owen did not believe that public galleries should contain only a small number of representative specimens. He argued strongly for broad public access to natural-history collections and resisted proposals that would have restricted displays largely to selected examples, while reserving the remainder for specialists. There was an unavoidable tension between the two objectives. Too many specimens could overwhelm an inexperienced visitor; too few could deprive visitors of the opportunity to encounter the diversity of nature for themselves. Interpretation could make collections intelligible, but the collections remained fundamental. More than 160 years later, essentially the same problem confronts natural-history museums. Modern galleries can use film, computer screens, interactive displays, reconstructions and extensive explanatory graphics in ways Owen could never have imagined. They can make difficult subjects accessible and can be particularly effective at engaging some audiences, including children. But the underlying question remains remarkably familiar: how much interpretation does a visitor need, and how much should the objects themselves be allowed to do the explaining? There is probably no single correct answer. Different subjects and different visitors require different approaches. What is striking is that the debate began long before the first visitor walked through the doors at South Kensington. |
Yet, Owen did not intend this selection of representative objects to become a substitute for public access to the wider collections. He resisted proposals that would have confined the public galleries largely to a small number of examples, while reserving the rest for specialists. He wanted the museum to make nature comprehensible, but he also wanted visitors to encounter something of its extraordinary abundance and diversity.
Waterhouse’s building itself contributed to the museum’s educational purpose. The terracotta animals and plants are not merely decoration: natural history is incorporated into the architecture. The broad division between extinct forms on the east side and living organisms on the west reflected the organisation of the collections and the intellectual world in which the museum was conceived.
That world was changing rapidly. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, while plans for the new museum were still developing. Evolution would transform biology and palaeontology, but Waterhouse’s building preserves something of the period in which those arguments were taking place. It can, therefore, be read almost as a historical document, as well as a museum.
The great Central Hall was particularly important. Now known as Hintze Hall, it remains the visitor’s principal introduction to the museum. Its contents have changed radically, but in one respect, its purpose remains surprisingly close to Owen’s original conception: a relatively small number of exceptional objects provide a glimpse of the much greater diversity waiting in the galleries beyond.
However, the institution surrounding it has changed profoundly. The nineteenth-century museum was principally concerned with collecting, classifying, studying and displaying the natural world. The modern Natural History Museum remains a major research institution, but its public ambitions extend much further into questions, such as biodiversity loss, climate change and humanity’s relationship with nature. The museum has described this shift as moving from being a catalogue of the natural world, towards becoming a catalyst for change.
That inevitably affects what its galleries are expected to do. A traditional specimen display may ask: What is this? Where did it come from? How old is it? A more interpretative gallery can ask: How did it form? What does it tell us? Why does it matter?
Those approaches need not be rivals. A fossil without context may mean little to somebody unable to identify it; interpretation can turn it into evidence for an extinct organism, an ancient environment or an evolutionary change. But a museum possessing collections of exceptional quality also has an advantage that a book, website or documentary does not: it can put the physical evidence in front of the visitor.
Nor should we expect every gallery to strike the same balance. An earthquake is an event rather than an object, while plate tectonics operates on a scale that cannot be placed in a cabinet. Models, diagrams and animation may be indispensable for explaining them. A dinosaur skeleton, ammonite or giant mineral crystal presents a different opportunity: the object itself can provide the initial impact, with interpretation explaining its significance.
The important question is, therefore, not whether screens, models and interactive displays belong in a natural-history museum. Clearly, they can. Nor is it whether traditional specimen cases are inherently superior. It is whether the balance suits the subject.
The Natural History Museum provides an unusually good place to explore that question, because very different approaches coexist within the same building. Some galleries allow extraordinary objects to dominate; others rely much more heavily on interpretation.
The obvious place to begin is the space Owen intended as the introduction to his museum. Hintze Hall is very different from the Index Museum he imagined, but it still performs something remarkably close to its original purpose. It introduces the natural world through a small number of extraordinary objects.
Entering the modern museum
Whatever questions may be raised about some of the Natural History Museum’s galleries, it would be difficult to argue that the museum has lost its ability to make natural objects spectacular. Hintze Hall demonstrates that immediately.
The former Central Hall was conceived as the heart of Waterhouse’s building and the starting point from which visitors would explore the collections. Today, it remains an immense, cathedral-like space, enclosed by richly decorated terracotta architecture. Suspended above it is one of the largest specimens in the museum: the skeleton of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) known as Hope.
The whale was stranded at Wexford Harbour in Ireland in 1891, only a decade after the museum opened. Since 2017, its skeleton has occupied the position formerly held by the famous cast of Diplodocus carnegii, ‘Dippy’. At more than 25m long, Hope appears almost to swim through the space above the visitors. Most importantly for the argument of this article, the spectacle begins with a genuine specimen (Fig. 6).
Hope is accompanied by interpretation – its story can lead into whaling, conservation and the biology of the largest animals ever to have lived, but the explanation begins with an object powerful enough to make visitors stop and look.
That approach continues in the alcoves around the hall. One particularly interesting example is the skeleton of an American mastodon (Mammut americanum; Fig. 7). The animal itself is impressive, but the specimen also has an unusual history of display. Before reaching the museum, it had been exhibited by an American entrepreneur as a supposed ‘aquatic monster’, with additional vertebrae and its tusks rearranged to make the skeleton appear still more extraordinary. Its subsequent reconstruction reflected improving knowledge of these extinct relatives of elephants.
Nearby, four fossil tree trunks take the visitor much further back in geological time (Fig. 8). They span hundreds of millions of years and make a subject that can otherwise seem abstract immediately tangible. Rather than simply being told that terrestrial vegetation has changed profoundly through geological time, the visitor is confronted with the physical remains of trees from vanished landscapes.
A very different object tells a still larger planetary story. A specimen of banded iron formation consists of alternating iron-rich and silica-rich layers formed in ancient seas (Fig. 9). Visually, it is simply an attractive banded rock. Its real significance becomes apparent only through interpretation: deposits of this kind preserve evidence of fundamental changes in the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere, as oxygen became increasingly important on the early Earth.
The hall also contains an object with particular importance for British dinosaur palaeontology: the holotype of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, from the Isle of Wight. A holotype is the specimen on which the formal definition of a species is based, so this is not simply an attractive dinosaur fossil, but part of the scientific foundation on which the name Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis rests (Fig. 10).
Taken together, these displays give Hintze Hall something close to the introductory function Owen envisaged for his Index Museum. A whale, an extinct proboscidean, fossil trees, an ancient rock, and a British dinosaur hardly constitute a systematic survey of natural history, nor are they intended to. Instead, a relatively small number of exceptional objects point towards the much larger subjects explored elsewhere in the museum.
The hall is also a useful corrective to any suggestion that the modern Natural History Museum has simply replaced specimens with screens and models. Here, the interpretation generally begins with the object. The objects are sufficiently remarkable to provide the initial impact; explanation then reveals why they matter.
However, standing beside the Mantellisaurus raises another question. Britain possesses one of the richest and historically most important fossil records in the world, and British fossils played a central role in the development of geology and palaeontology. The Natural History Museum holds collections worthy of that history.
One might, therefore, expect the British fossil record to occupy a particularly prominent place in the national natural-history museum. The reality is rather different.
Where are Britain’s fossils?
For a country of its size, Britain possesses an extraordinary fossil record. Cambrian trilobites from Wales, Silurian faunas from the Welsh Borderland, Devonian fishes from Scotland, Carboniferous plants and marine fossils, Jurassic ammonites and reptiles, Cretaceous dinosaurs and Chalk fossils represent only part of a succession extending through much of the history of complex life.
That record also occupies a special place in the history of geology and palaeontology. British rocks and fossils were being studied while the geological timescale itself was being established, and names such as Mary Anning, William Buckland, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen are inseparable from the early development of the science.
The Natural History Museum holds collections worthy of that history. Yet, a visitor looking specifically for an introduction to Britain’s fossil record encounters something surprisingly modest.
The display entitled Fossils from Britain occupies a relatively small series of wall cases. It contains interesting specimens from different periods and environments, and provides a useful introduction to British fossils. There is nothing particularly wrong with the display itself. The surprise is its scale (Fig. 11).
This has not always been the extent of the museum’s treatment of British fossils. Until comparatively recently, a substantially larger room devoted to British fossils existed in addition to the smaller wall display. The two, therefore, coexisted: the present Fossils from Britain cases were not created simply to replace the larger display.
The precise history is frustratingly difficult to establish from the readily available published record. In particular, I have not been able to establish with sufficient confidence the formal name of the larger room, the exact date at which it closed, or the reasons for its closure. It would, therefore, be unwise to give a precision that the evidence does not justify. What is clear from personal recollection is that the room contained British fossils, rather than a mixture of fossils, rocks and minerals, and that its disappearance has left the much smaller wall display carrying most of the burden of presenting Britain’s fossil record as a coherent subject.
There is a broader historical context, because South Kensington once contained an entirely separate Geological Museum (see box: From the Geological Museum to today’s British fossils).
| From the Geological Museum to today’s British fossils |
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| The Geological Museum had its origins in the Museum of Economic Geology, established in 1841. It later became the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, before moving to a purpose-built building in Exhibition Road, adjoining the Natural History Museum, which opened in 1935. Its galleries dealt extensively with geology, including the rocks, geological structure and economic resources of Britain. Fossils formed an important part of that story, and by the later twentieth century, the museum included a substantial British Fossils exhibition, in which specimens were arranged by geological age and formation. It would be misleading to imagine the Geological Museum simply as rows of traditional specimen cases. It became increasingly innovative in its interpretation. Exhibitions such as The Story of the Earth, Britain Before Man and British Fossils used modern display techniques, while Treasures of the Earth, opened in 1985, incorporated interactive and computer-based exhibits. The debate between specimens and interpretation was, therefore, already being explored within the Geological Museum itself. In 1985, the Geological Museum was incorporated into the Natural History Museum. This needs one important qualification: the Geological Survey’s palaeontological research collections had moved to Keyworth with the Survey, rather than passing wholesale to the Natural History Museum. What South Kensington inherited was the Geological Museum building, staff, substantial geological collections and, importantly, a long tradition of presenting British geology to the public. Until comparatively recently, a room devoted to British fossils also existed within the Natural History Museum in addition to the much smaller Fossils from Britain wall display that survives today. Its precise closure date and formal history have proved difficult to establish, so it is better not to attach a date to its disappearance without firmer evidence. The result, however, is readily visible. A visitor specifically seeking an account of Britain’s fossil history now finds a comparatively modest display that can easily be overlooked. |
None of this means that British fossils have disappeared from the museum. Far from it. We have already encountered the holotype of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis in Hintze Hall. Elsewhere are British marine reptiles, dinosaurs and numerous individual fossils of great scientific and historical importance. Baryonyx walkeri, discovered in Surrey, will provide a particularly striking example when we reach the Dinosaur Gallery (Fig. 31, below). The issue is, therefore, not the absence of British material, but its context and visibility.
Nor should an international institution be expected to organise its galleries principally around Britain. The Natural History Museum holds collections from across the world and addresses subjects that transcend national boundaries. Its remit is vastly broader than British palaeontology.
Nevertheless, Britain offers an unusually rich geological story on the museum’s doorstep. Lyme Regis and the Dorset coast, the Yorkshire coast, the Isle of Wight, the Chalk, the Carboniferous districts, Scotland’s Devonian fishes and the Palaeozoic rocks of Wales and the Welsh Borderland together provide an exceptional journey through geological time. They also connect fossils with the people who helped create the sciences of geology and palaeontology.
A substantial British fossil display could, therefore, do much more than celebrate local material. It could introduce geological time, changing environments, evolution and extinction, while simultaneously explaining why Britain became so important in the history of Earth science. The present wall cases can only begin to tell that story.
However, the museum itself provides plenty of evidence that specimen-rich displays can still work. To see that, we need not speculate about how a larger British fossil gallery might look. We need only walk into some of the galleries that already exist. One of the best examples contains fossils associated with the most famous collector in the history of British palaeontology: Mary Anning.
When the specimens take over
If the Fossils from Britain display seems surprisingly modest, elsewhere in the museum, there are galleries in which the specimens are allowed to dominate. The Mary Anning Gallery is perhaps the clearest example.
The approach is comparatively traditional. Large fossils occupy substantial cases, labels provide the necessary information and there is relatively little technological intervention between visitor and object. Yet, the gallery hardly feels dull. Its strength lies in the quality and scale of the fossils themselves.
A spectacular example is the skeleton of Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni, a large Early Jurassic marine reptile. Mounted against the wall, it needs little theatrical assistance. Its size, completeness and unfamiliar proportions immediately attract attention (Fig. 12).
The surrounding cases contain further marine reptiles, allowing different animals to be compared, rather than encountered as isolated showpieces. Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are particularly well suited to this style of display, because their skeletons reveal so much of their anatomy at a glance (Fig. 13).
The gallery extends well beyond the fossils actually collected by Mary Anning. Among its other marine reptiles is Leiodon anceps, a mosasaur from the Late Cretaceous (Fig. 14). Mosasaurs were large marine squamates, rather than dinosaurs, and became important predators in the oceans during the final part of the Mesozoic.
Another mosasaur, Platecarpus, provides a useful contrast. The value of displaying several related animals is precisely that a museum collection can reveal diversity that a single spectacular specimen cannot (Fig. 15).
British material is also present. Dacentrurus armatus, represented by fossils from Swindon, brings us back to the point raised in the previous section (Fig. 16). Important British fossils certainly exist throughout the museum; what is largely missing is a substantial gallery that brings the British fossil story together.
One specimen, however, gives the gallery a particularly direct connection with the woman whose name it bears. Mary Anning (1799–1847) collected fossils from the cliffs around Lyme Regis, at a time when palaeontology was only beginning to emerge as a science. Her discoveries included important ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and other Jurassic animals, and her practical knowledge of the Dorset coast made her one of the most remarkable fossil collectors of the nineteenth century.
Among the museum’s treasures is Plesiosaurus macrocephalus, collected by Anning at Lyme Regis in 1830. Here, the significance of seeing the original specimen becomes particularly apparent. It is not simply an example of a plesiosaur that could be replaced without loss by an equally complete cast. It is an object with its own scientific and human history (Fig. 17).
That distinction matters. A reconstruction can show what a plesiosaur may have looked like alive, and an animation may demonstrate how it might have swum. Neither can reproduce the experience of looking at the fossil that Mary Anning herself recovered almost two centuries ago. Interpretation makes its significance intelligible; the specimen supplies the connection with the past.
The gallery also contains fossils from much further afield. The enormous ground sloth Megatherium americanum is an obvious example. Its skeleton belongs to a completely different chapter of Earth history, but its sheer scale again allows the object to provide the spectacle (Fig. 18).
A similar philosophy survives in parts of the Mammals Gallery. Long ranks of cases may appear old-fashioned beside the museum’s newer exhibitions, but they possess an important advantage: they allow visitors to compare actual specimens (Fig. 19).
The fossil mammals themselves reveal how unfamiliar much of mammalian evolution has been. Smilodon fatalis, the sabre-toothed cat, is immediately recognisable as a predator, yet its extraordinary upper canines distinguish it from living cats (Fig. 20).
Other specimens are less familiar. Cynognathus belongs much deeper in the ancestry of mammals. Although superficially mammal-like, it was a cynodont synapsid living during the Triassic, and animals of this general evolutionary stock ultimately gave rise to true mammals (Fig. 21).
Still stranger is Arsinoitherium zitteli, a large African herbivore, whose paired horns give it a superficial resemblance to a rhinoceros, despite belonging to a very different branch of the mammalian evolutionary tree (Fig. 22).
A display of extinct proboscideans makes the comparative value of the gallery particularly clear. Modern elephants are merely the surviving representatives of a much more diverse group, and placing several extinct forms together allows changes in skulls, jaws and tusks to be appreciated directly (Fig. 23).
There are obvious limitations to this style of gallery. Long ranks of specimens can overwhelm visitors who do not know what they are looking at, and younger visitors in particular may respond more immediately to reconstruction, movement and interaction. A return to rooms filled indiscriminately with Victorian cases would not solve every problem of modern museum display.
But the Mary Anning and Mammals galleries demonstrate something important. Specimen-rich does not necessarily mean old-fashioned, any more than interactive necessarily means effective. The strongest displays combine the two essential elements: an object worth seeing and enough interpretation to reveal why it matters.
That distinction becomes particularly interesting in the museum’s most famous fossil attraction. The Dinosaur Gallery contains genuine fossils, casts, mounted skeletons, reconstructions, models, screens and interactive displays, often within the same space.
If the Mary Anning Gallery shows what happens when the specimens take over, the Dinosaur Gallery provides a much more complicated experiment in what happens when the specimens must share the stage.
Dinosaurs: specimens, spectacle and screens
Few parts of the Natural History Museum attract more attention than the Dinosaur Gallery. It is often crowded, particularly with families, and that popularity is hardly surprising. Dinosaurs combine enormous public appeal, with some of the most spectacular objects a natural-history museum can display.
They also present an unusual challenge. Fossilised bones can reveal anatomy, injuries, growth and sometimes diet, but visitors understandably want to know much more. How did dinosaurs move? What did they eat? How did they behave? What did they look like when alive? Answering such questions inevitably requires reconstruction and interpretation.
The gallery consequently combines original fossils with casts, mounted skeletons, models, graphics, screens and interactive exhibits. At its best, this mixture works extremely well. At other points, the amount of interpretative material can make the fossils themselves less immediately prominent.
One display illustrates the balance particularly clearly. Genuine dinosaur skulls are mounted above interactive screens, allowing visitors to examine the fossils, while using the displays below to explore what their anatomy can reveal (Fig. 24).
Not everything displayed as a dinosaur object is original fossil material. Casts have always played an important role in palaeontology, because significant specimens are scattered among museums across the world. They allow important anatomy to be compared and displayed, without moving fragile or unique originals.
A cast of the thickened skull of Pachycephalosaurus, displayed beside a cast of the formidable tail club of the armoured dinosaur Euoplocephalus, demonstrates how effectively such material can communicate unusual dinosaur anatomy (Fig. 25).
Models perform a different function. The enormous head of Tyrannosaurus rex makes no claim to be a fossil: it attempts to turn a skeleton back into an animal. Its scale is undeniably impressive and helps visitors imagine the living predator represented elsewhere by bones and teeth (Fig. 26).
But, perhaps the clearest demonstration of the appeal of reconstruction is the gallery’s moving Tyrannosaurus rex (Fig. 27). During my visit, a large crowd, including many children, had gathered to watch it. Whatever reservations one might have about the prominence of models in a natural-history museum, there was no doubting its ability to capture attention. The more interesting question is what happens next: whether that initial excitement encourages visitors to examine the fossils and discover how palaeontologists reconstruct animals that disappeared millions of years ago.
Mounted skeletons provide another form of reconstruction, because, even when original bones are incorporated, missing elements may have to be cast or restored, and the skeleton arranged in a posture it never possessed in the rock. Suspended specimens are especially effective in the Dinosaur Gallery, where visitors have traditionally been able to see them from different levels (Fig. 28).
Fig. 28. A suspended theropod skeleton in the Dinosaur Gallery, photographed from the elevated walkway. Displaying dinosaur skeletons above the visitor allows their overall proportions and three-dimensional construction to be appreciated in a way that isolated bones cannot provide. At the time of the author’s visit, the elevated walkway through the gallery was closed. The gallery is expected to change as part of the museum’s wider programme of redevelopment, so its present arrangement should not be regarded as permanent. (Photo by the author.)
But, some of the most interesting objects in the gallery are much less theatrical. A pathological pelvis of Iguanodon bernissartensis, for example, records an injury suffered during the life of an individual dinosaur. Bone grew around the damaged area, demonstrating that the animal survived long enough for healing to take place (Fig. 29).
Nearby, a mounted replica of Iguanodon bernissartensis (Fig. 30) provides a useful comparison with the Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis encountered in Hintze Hall. The history of these animals is closely bound up with changing interpretations of Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaurs to be scientifically recognised.
For a British visitor, one of the gallery’s most important dinosaurs is Baryonyx walkeri. Its discovery began in 1983, when amateur fossil collector William Walker found an unusually large claw in a Surrey clay pit. Further excavation revealed a remarkably informative partial skeleton of a previously unknown predatory dinosaur.
Baryonyx possessed an elongated, crocodile-like skull, numerous conical teeth and enormous claws on its forelimbs. Evidence associated with the specimen also contributed to the interpretation of spinosaurs as predators capable of feeding on fish. The discovery became internationally important, while retaining a particularly strong connection with British amateur fossil collecting (Fig. 31).
Other fossils preserve evidence, not simply of anatomy, but of behaviour. A specimen of the small Late Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis contains remains of a small crocodile-line archosaur within its ribcage. Here, the evidence for feeding is contained in the fossil itself (Fig. 32).
At the opposite extreme in size and appearance is Triceratops. Its huge skull, horns and bony frill are so distinctive that the specimen needs relatively little assistance to attract attention (Fig. 33).
The gallery also contains one of the most historically important objects in British dinosaur palaeontology: the famous Maidstone specimen discovered in Kent in 1834 (Fig. 34). Originally associated with Iguanodon, it played an important role in the early reconstruction of dinosaurs and is now assigned to Mantellisaurus. Readers of Deposits may recognise it from our article on Maidstone Museum (see Geological museums of Britain: Maidstone Museum – dinosaurs, ancient seas and the geology of Kent).
Taken together, these exhibits demonstrate why a simple opposition between ‘real specimens’ and ‘modern interpretation’ would be misleading. Casts allow important material from other collections to be seen. Models reconstruct animals that nobody has ever observed alive. Interactive displays can encourage children and other visitors to investigate anatomy that might otherwise be passed without a second glance. The question is what those devices ultimately encourage the visitor to notice.
The pathological Iguanodon records an injury and recovery. Baryonyx preserves the anatomy of an extraordinary British predator. The Coelophysis specimen contains evidence of feeding. The Maidstone slab is simultaneously a dinosaur fossil and an object from the history of palaeontology. In each case, interpretation is powerful because there is physical evidence for it to explain.
These are not merely illustrations for stories. They are the evidence from which the stories were constructed.
That provides a useful way of judging the Dinosaur Gallery. Interpretation is at its most effective, when it sends us back to the object: look at this bone, examine these teeth, notice the injury, compare these skeletons and understand why this particular fossil changed an idea. It is less convincing when the apparatus of interpretation becomes the attraction in itself and the specimen recedes behind it.
The Dinosaur Gallery contains examples of both approaches. Its popularity demonstrates the enormous power of spectacle, reconstruction and interaction, particularly for younger visitors. Its finest fossils demonstrate something equally important: with collections of this quality, the museum already possesses objects capable of generating wonder.
There is, however, one complication before reaching any broader conclusion about what the museum ought to display. Everything we have examined so far belongs to the tiny proportion of the Natural History Museum’s holdings that the public can actually see.
Behind the galleries lies another museum altogether: a scientific collection of more than 80 million specimens, most of which will never appear in a public display. That hidden museum changes the argument considerably.
What we see — and what we don’t
After considering the modest Fossils from Britain display and the mixture of specimens, casts and interpretation in the Dinosaur Gallery, it would be tempting to conclude that the Natural History Museum should simply put more of its collections on display.
The reality is much more complicated. The museum holds more than 80 million specimens, encompassing animals, plants, fungi, fossils, rocks, minerals and meteorites. No conceivable arrangement of the public galleries could display more than a tiny proportion of them. More importantly, many were never collected primarily for exhibition.
Behind the public museum is an international scientific institution, employing more than 400 scientists, while researchers from elsewhere make extensive use of its collections. To a visitor, a drawer containing dozens of apparently similar shells or ammonites might look unnecessarily repetitive. To a researcher, differences in locality, geological horizon, age or morphology may make every specimen valuable.
The enormous collection is, therefore, not a surplus of objects waiting for enough display cases. It is one of the principal reasons the museum exists (see box: Eighty million specimens – the museum behind the museum).
| Eighty million specimens – the museum behind the museum |
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| It is easy to judge a museum by what can be seen in its galleries. However, at the Natural History Museum, the public displays represent only a tiny fraction of the institution. The museum cares for more than 80 million specimens, ranging from meteorites and minerals, to fossils, plants and animals. Together, they form an active scientific archive, rather than simply a reservoir from which exhibits are selected. Modern analytical techniques can extract information their original collectors could scarcely have imagined. Historical specimens can reveal chemical composition, evolutionary relationships, past environments, and changes in biodiversity. Material collected decades or centuries ago can consequently acquire new scientific importance, when new questions and new techniques become available. Nor could more than a tiny proportion of 80 million objects sensibly be placed on permanent display. Some are fragile; others are most valuable as parts of large comparative collections. Apparently repetitive specimens may document variation between populations, localities or geological horizons. Therefore, the museum must perform two very different, but complementary functions. It is a public attraction receiving millions of visitors, but it is also an international scientific research institution. A specimen disappearing from public display has not necessarily disappeared into neglect. It may remain preserved, documented and available for research. But that does not make questions about display irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Because only a minute proportion of such an extraordinary collection can ever be shown, the decision about which specimens the public gets to see becomes particularly important. |
Palaeontology illustrates the point particularly well. A fossil species is not scientifically represented by whichever specimen happens to be the most complete or visually impressive. Variation matters, as do geographical distribution and changes through geological time. A large series of relatively ordinary fossils may answer questions that one magnificent specimen cannot.
Type specimens have a particular importance. The holotype of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis encountered in Hintze Hall (Fig. 10, above) is not merely a particularly good dinosaur fossil: it is the reference specimen on which that species is based. Other specimens can be compared with it, as scientists investigate the anatomy and relationships of the animal. Scientific importance and exhibition value, therefore, overlap, but they are not identical.
There are also practical reasons why permanent display is not necessarily desirable. Some specimens are too fragile or light-sensitive; others may be required for research or loans. Large collections must be stored under controlled conditions and organised, so that individual objects and their associated information can be retrieved. ‘Not on display’ should not automatically be translated as ‘hidden away’.
The same distinction is worth remembering when considering the resources devoted to visitors. The Natural History Museum received more than seven million visitors in 2025. Those people need entrances, toilets, circulation space, seating, cafés and other facilities. The permanent galleries are free to enter, while maintaining an enormous Grade I-listed building and its collections is hardly free to the institution.
The number of shops and catering outlets may occasionally make it seem easier to find somewhere to buy something than to find a substantial display explaining the British fossil record. But it would be unfair to treat the existence of cafés and shops as evidence that commerce has displaced science. Retail and catering generate income and provide services that millions of visitors reasonably require.
The visitor numbers also complicate any criticism of the museum’s approach to interpretation. Screens, reconstructions and interactive displays may appeal particularly to children and families, and the crowds themselves demonstrate that the museum is extraordinarily successful at attracting people to natural history. My personal preference for specimen-rich galleries cannot establish that they are objectively better for every audience.
Nevertheless, the nature of the museum’s collections raises an important question about what distinguishes a visit to South Kensington from other ways of learning about natural history.
Information is no longer scarce. Excellent animations of plate tectonics can be watched online. Digital reconstructions can show dinosaurs walking, feeding and fighting. Books, television programmes and websites can provide explanations at almost any level of complexity.
An original fossil is different. The Plesiosaurus macrocephalus collected by Mary Anning in 1830 cannot be downloaded. The holotype of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis cannot be replaced by an animation. A photograph can show Baryonyx extremely well, but it is not the fossil recovered from the rocks of Surrey.
That physical authenticity is one of the great advantages of a museum collection, and the digital age may have made it more, rather than less important.
This does not mean that the Natural History Museum should attempt to cover its walls with as many specimens as possible. Most of its 80 million objects belong exactly where they are: in scientifically organised collections where they can be conserved, studied and compared.
The harder question is which tiny fraction should be selected for public display and what should be done with it once it gets there. That takes us back to the problem Richard Owen confronted before Waterhouse’s building opened. Selection is unavoidable; so is interpretation. But the museum possesses something that no amount of interpretation can manufacture: one of the world’s great collections of the physical evidence from which our understanding of nature has been constructed.
With that in mind, we can return to the question with which this article began. What should a great natural-history museum do with a great collection?
What should a great natural-history museum be?
The Natural History Museum is an extraordinary institution. Its building is magnificent, its collections rank among the greatest in the world, and its popularity is beyond question. More than seven million visitors in a year is an extraordinary achievement for any museum, particularly one whose permanent collections can be visited without an admission charge. Any assessment should begin there, because it would be easy for criticism of individual galleries to obscure just how much the museum gets right.
But the question running through this article has not been whether the Natural History Museum is a great museum. It plainly is. The more interesting question is what a great natural-history museum should do with a great collection.
Selection is unavoidable. With more than 80 million specimens, only a minute proportion can ever be exhibited. Many objects are more valuable in research collections than in public galleries, while others are too fragile or unsuitable for permanent display. Therefore, no sensible argument can be made for simply putting more and more material into cases.
Interpretation is equally unavoidable. A fossil, mineral or preserved animal does not necessarily explain itself. Without context, a visitor may have no idea what an object is, why it matters or what scientists have learned from it. For subjects such as evolution, climate change, earthquakes and plate tectonics, objects alone cannot tell the whole story. The issue is the relationship between the two.
Perhaps the simplest principle is this: interpretation should reveal the significance of a specimen, rather than make the specimen incidental to the interpretation.
Some of the museum’s strongest displays demonstrate how effective that can be. Hope dominates Hintze Hall because a 25m blue whale skeleton needs no manufactured spectacle to establish its presence. Interpretation then transforms an enormous skeleton into a story about the largest animals ever to have lived, their biology and their relationship with humanity.
The Mary Anning Gallery works differently, but reaches much the same destination. Its comparatively traditional, Victorian cases allow remarkable fossils to command attention, while their labels explain what the visitor is seeing. The Plesiosaurus macrocephalus collected by Anning in 1830 is scientifically interesting, but seeing the actual specimen also creates a connection with the history of palaeontology, which a photograph or replica cannot reproduce.
The Dinosaur Gallery shows why the answer cannot simply be ‘more specimens and fewer screens’. Reconstructions can restore flesh to skeletons; casts can bring important specimens from other collections into the gallery; interactive displays can encourage children to investigate anatomy; and animation can explore movement and behaviour that fossilised bones cannot show directly.
Yet, the same gallery also demonstrates the exceptional power of the objects themselves. The pathology in Iguanodon, the remains of prey within Coelophysis, Baryonyx and the Maidstone dinosaur slab all contain evidence from which scientific stories have been reconstructed. The most successful interpretation encourages us to look back at that evidence with greater understanding.
This is why the present treatment of Britain’s fossil record seems such a missed opportunity. The problem is not that British fossils are absent from the museum. Important examples occur throughout its galleries. It is that the coherent national story once represented more substantially is now difficult for a visitor to discover, while the surviving Fossils from Britain display is remarkably modest for a country whose rocks and fossils played such an important part in the development of geology and palaeontology.
A larger British fossil display would not require a return to a nineteenth-century museum. It could use modern interpretation, reconstruction and digital media where they genuinely help. But at its centre could be the fossils themselves: physical evidence of changing environments, evolution and extinction, and of the discoveries through which those ideas developed.
In that respect, Richard Owen’s original problem has never disappeared. Owen wanted his Index Museum to make an enormous collection intelligible, but he did not envisage a museum in which a small number of representative specimens replaced broad public access to the collections. His solution attempted to combine selection with abundance, orientation with exploration.
The modern Natural History Museum operates on a scale Owen could scarcely have imagined. Its collections are vastly larger, its science uses techniques unavailable even a generation ago, and its visitors arrive with expectations shaped by television, the internet and interactive technology. There can be no simple return to Owen’s museum.
But one principle remains remarkably durable.
Explain the natural world, but let people see the evidence.
That may be more important now than it was when the museum opened in 1881. Images, animations and explanations of almost every aspect of natural history are available instantly on a telephone or computer. What the Natural History Museum possesses that the digital world cannot reproduce is authenticity: the actual fossil, skeleton, mineral, meteorite or biological specimen.
The museum, therefore, does not have to choose between being a scientific institution, an educational institution and a popular attraction. Its collections allow it to be all three. Nor does it have to choose absolutely between specimens and interpretation. The strongest galleries show how effectively they can reinforce one another.
So, what should a great natural-history museum do with a great collection?
It should preserve it, study it, explain it and, wherever it reasonably can, let us see it. But we have so far examined only part of the museum. The former Geological Museum and the galleries associated with it pose a rather different version of the same problem. Geology is not simply a collection of objects. An earthquake cannot be placed in a cabinet. Neither can continental drift, the opening of an ocean, the growth of a mountain range or hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Here, models, diagrams, reconstruction and other forms of interpretation are not merely optional additions; they may be essential to explaining the subject.
That makes the Earth Galleries particularly interesting. They provide an opportunity to ask whether the balance that sometimes troubles me elsewhere in the museum works differently when the museum is trying to explain processes, rather than principally display objects.
And there are some exceptional objects to see. Earth’s Treasures begins with the materials from which the planet is made. Lasting Impressions uses fossils and traces of past life to reconstruct vanished environments. From the Beginning attempts something still more ambitious: to lead the visitor through the history and evolution of life itself. Together, they provide a progression from minerals and rocks, through geological processes and the evidence they leave behind, to fossils and the history of life.
Having asked what a great natural-history museum should show, we can now ask the complementary question: how should a great geological collection be used to explain the history of an entire planet?
| About the museum |
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| Address: Cromwell Rd, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD Website: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/ |
| OTHER PARTS IN THIS ARTICLE |
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| Geology museums of Britain: The Natural History Museum, London (Part 1) – what should a great museum show? |
| Geology museums of Britain: The Natural History Museum, London (Part 2) – reading the evidence |