Natural History Museum
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Natural History Museum

By Katie Brennan

I went to the Natural History Museum and was reminded of a widely recognized fact: mini and giant versions of animals are way cooler than the regular sized versions. The natural history museum has the bodies of pygmy: shrews, bats, and marmosets,giant: sloths and armadillos (5 feet tall!), and the very tiny ancestor to the modern horse. An utterly fantastic collection.

There is a giantDiplodicus carnegii *(dinosaur) *creatively named Dippy in the main entrance to the museum. Elsewhere: elephant bird egg, the offspring of two different subspecies of tiger who ended up having fur patterning intermediate between both parents, a dodo skeleton, a thylacine, lots and lots of dinosaur fossils, mastodons, mammoths, elephants, a narwhal, and anglerfish (DFTBA) among MANY otheramazing specimens.

I was a bit put off: the museum display claimed that the archaeopteryx was NOT a dinosaur. That simply can’t be right. But since when were museums wrong? If you have any light to shed on the matter please comment below! I need to know.

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