Natural History Museum
Victorian cathedral-like museum housing fifty million specimens, including Hope, the world's only blue whale skeleton hung in a diving posture.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Natural History Museum in London follows a blue whale that swam into the shallows of an Irish harbour in 1891 and could not get free, and the museum's offer to buy her skeleton once a fisherman had killed her. It traces the decades those bones spent in storage and later in a back gallery few visitors ever found, and the vision behind the cathedral-like hall itself, built in 1881 at the urging of Richard Owen, the scientist who coined the word dinosaur. Stand at the centre of Hintze Hall and look straight up.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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