Natural History Museum

London’s Natural History Museum is both a world-leading science research centre, and the most-visited natural history museum in Europe. The museum includes five main collections of botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology – dating back millions of years to the very dawn of our planet’s creation. Amongst the eighty million specimens in the museum, are exhibitions of dinosaur skeletons, meteorites, rare stones and metals, Neanderthal skulls and valuable items collected by and related to Charles Darwin. The building itself was opened in 1881, and was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, displaying an ornate, Romanesque style. The Victorian architecture incorporates unique sculptural details of exotic flora and fauna, built into the terracotta and plaster brickwork, and earning the museum the name 'Cathedral of Nature'. Hintze Hall currently exhibits a full size, real blue whale skeleton named Hope. Hope is 129 years old, and measures 25 m (82 ft) in length with a weight of 4.5 tonnes. Hope replaced the famous Dippy the Dinosaur, the Museums iconic Diplodocus that was cast in 2017, and which has recently toured eight venues across the UK. Hintze Hall also features star specimens chosen to celebrate the wonder and beauty of the natural world, including a 122-129-million-year-old Mantellisaurus and a 2.5-billion-year-old banded iron formation.