Internet Apocalypse

So, the internet apocalypse has finally come upon you. ITunes is no longer downloading your favourite Pod Casts, the hours of illegally streamed media are no longer at your fingertips and your escape into the World Of Warcraft has been closed down indefinitely. What is left to live for?! Well, lets hope you have at least had the foresight to download this blog in its entirety or you’re really in trouble.

This blog doesn’t just deal with books and computer games. Its purpose is to provide a list of fun and interesting things to keep you occupied in the unfortunate event of your complete isolation from the internet and all the luxuries it brings to the comfort of your arm chair. Today’s report looks at the London Natural History Museum.

The museum itself is located on Exhibition street in London. The nearest tube is South Kensington, a two minute walk away. Before you even enter through the massive doors, you might be instantly struck by the sheer size and grandeur of the building that is the Natural History Museum and rightly so. Wikipedia assures me that the museum itself is nearly one hundred and thirty years old & holds over 70 Million items and exhibits.

Inside, the museum is split into four separate zones:

• Red – The planet itself, mainly geology. It has lots of video footage of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as well as an earthquake simulator! The entrance into this zone is arguably the most impressive you are likely to see in a museum, with a long escalator ride which takes you through the centre of a massive sculpture of the planet. There’s a good photo opportunity here too.
• Green – Learn all about ecology. This section covers fossils, insects, primates and evolution. You have the opportunity to see a dodo (stuffed of course) and if you are lucky, here is where you are most likely to see specimens collected by Charles Darwin.
• Blue – This is my favourite zone. As well as the mammal room which has hundreds of models, skeletons and exhibitions of mammals, past and present, as well as some interesting models of the ancestors of today’s modern mammals, you’ll also find exhibits on human biology.. Best of all though, the blue zone is where you’ll find the dinosaurs!! Anna and I had tonnes of fun trying to name all the various skeletons and fossils.
• Orange – This is the Museums wildlife garden which is fairly pleasant. Being brought up on a diet of movies, video games, dinosaurs, sci-fi and violence, the plants didn’t excite me as much as perhaps they should have done. However, the Orange zone is also where the Darwin Centre can be found and this is perhaps the highlight of a trip to the Museum. There are a limited number of tours around the centre, which is in a separate building to the main museum and tickets can be booked at the start of the visit. Thankfully, they keep the groups small as they take people round the centre which is a good thing as we were directed around the centre, which is a fully functioning laboratory, by a real live scientist!! There are plenty of opportunities to ask questions as you are shown round what seems to be a collection of a kind of Noah’s ark of pickled animals in jars. I think a small amount of people may not find this as exciting as I did, either because they are squeamish, which is understandable, or because they are idiots, which is not.

Gruesome – the pickled remains of many creatures, from all over the world can be found at the Darwin Centre.

It is advisable to decide on maybe two of the four zones as, to get the most out of the museum and see everything, you will definitely need to visit a few times. Because of the unique seasonal exhibitions and the ever changing content in the museum, you are guaranteed to see something different every month too. And best of all, its all FREE.

One final thing, the NHM website contains hours of free video lectures on a wide spectrum of biological topics. The lectures themselves are given by engaging scientists, usually experts in his or her field of study. This is a really valuable and interesting resource that I don’t think the Natural History Museum advertise nearly enough.