London Natural History Museum

It was a cold day, so Tony and I sought out something to do to avoid cabin fever. We decided that going to the London Natural History Museum was the perfect thing to do.












Apparently, so did everyone else, as the line to get in was enormous. Thankfully, it wasn't raining.








The building is a spectacular Victorian triumph. It is built out of millions of Terracotta tiles, and there are animals worked into the architecture all over the place making it a fun museum to look at.









Inside, the main hall is enormous and features a large dinosaur skeleton as its centerpiece.








And seated on a throne overlooking the center hall is a statue of that royal member of the Natural Selection world, non other than Mr. Charles Darwin himself.









The museum houses a respectable Dinosaur exhibit, but I was expecting more than what I got to see. I thought London had one of the largest collections of Dinosaur bones, but it made me appreciate the rather sizable collection in Los Angeles.




Most of the bones are part of an exhibit with some fun suspended walkways that filter you through the different displays in a controlled manner.





The exhibit is mostly aimed at families with children rather than some sort of hard-core dinosaur junkie like me that would love to get up close to a case filled with dinosaur bones sans fancy mood lighting.



There are a couple great Dino skulls on display. It is hard however to tell whether you are getting the real deal, or a casting. It seems nowadays, that most of the dinosaurs skeletons on display are recreations or duplicates.







Speaking or recreations, there are some fun (for the kids) Jurassic Park animatronic raptors that pop up throughout the exhibit. Kind of fun.








The dramatic climax for the display is an animatronic T-rex. It moves and roars in a fairly impressive manner. Nicely done, and scary enough to make some of the younger kids cry.







I'm not sure what the T-rex is doing with the double decker bus, but you know you are in London, when that is what is used to convey the size of a T-rex.







After the dinosaurs, we went up to the mineral display. It is mostly cases filled with every kind of granite, quartzite and every other kind of "ite" that you can imagine.






They even had Kryptonite. Just kidding.

But some of the rocks looked like they could have been.









They even had a large iron meteorite. Now, that was cool.






Most of it wasn't that interesting, but what could top a giant moving, roaring T-rex. The best pieces are at the far end of the room in the vault. The highlight to me being the rock from Mars, which looked a lot like a rock from earth. It wasn't even red. . . (perhaps I should have brought some spray paint)








There are also some great examples of Gold Ore, Emeralds and a unique watermelon colored crystal.







After finishing the museum, we made our way across the street to what I think was the highlight of the trip for Tony - A full on Cheese Cave shop. We had a wonderful grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of French Bordeaux. That's the way to detox after dealing with a museum full of children.