Natural History Museum

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.