In which we see another third of the Natural History Museum

Perhaps you remember back a few days ago that I said that we'd only managed to see about a third of the collection at the Natural History Museum when we went the first time. And perhaps you remember that, unlike the British Museum, my kids thought the Natural History Museum was both fun and interesting. Well, it seemed a bit of a shame to only see a third of a cool museum, and so on Wednesday, we went back, one of the perks of spending two weeks in a city. (Being able to spend a day reading and playing video games on vacation is another perk.)

We headed for the blue zone to start out this time. The bulk of the blue zone is made up of taxidermied animals (most of them several decades old, since the museum is no longer collecting new specimens), skeletons of more ancient animals, and replicas of what they would likely have looked like, given the skeletons. Have you ever wondered what the ancestors of elephants looked like, several iterations before mammoths and mastodons roams the land? Pretty bizarre if you ask me, with giant tusks jutting out of both upper and lower jaws. 

The blue zone also had a fairly interesting exhibit on human development, which seemed to have a strange fascination with childbirth. Not, mind you, with pregnancy, nor with infancy, but only with childbirth. I don't have an explanation either.

From there we headed to the orange zone, which has two main parts. The first is a big outdoor garden which attempts to show flora and fauna (ok, bugs, it isn't that big) from all over England, complete with little doors that we could open to see the layering of the soil on different parts of the island. 

The cooler part though is called the cocoon, and it is a big scientific research area for the 300 or so scientists that the museum has in house. The top two floors, out of seven, provide an opportunity for people to learn a little bit more out what scientists do. 

From there we headed back inside to the dinosaur exhibit, which may, as they claim, be wildly popular, but which is also rather lame. It starts out promisingly enough, with the standard skeletons of the giant dinosaurs before herding visitors up a narrow staircase to a sort of catwalk flanked by skeletons of smaller dinosaurs—gallimimus, compsognathus, ornithomimus—and then a ramp down past a horrid roaring animatronic T. rex. It all went downhill from there, at least figuratively. We we're happy to escape as quickly as possible. 

We finished our visit with a trip to the treasure room—stuffed great awks, an original copy of The Origin of the Species, a dwarf elephant tooth—before heading for home.