#natural-history-museum

#natural-history-museum

The Natural History Museum in South Kensington plans to open two spaces, one of which hasn't been seen by visitors since World War II. The aptly named Old General Herbarium has not been seen by Londoners since 1948 and is set to launch in 2026 as a pop-up Hidden Histories gallery. Origins gallery, which has been shut since 2004, will also reopen as a 'Land and Air gallery' sometime before the institution's 150th birthday in 2031.

Santa Jaws is now on show for all to see. The yuletide display is less heartwarming, and more horror movie, as it depicts the big dino clad in his jumper and Santa hat terrorising a town, surrounded by snowy mountains, trees and houses. As for the jumper's design, we know this is what you're all here for. This year's jumper features a selection of the museum's finest prehistoric specimens, including a T-Rex skull and ammonite fossil, with an illustration of the South Kensington building on the back.

Although it's still the number one destination in the country to see weird stuff that the Victorians taxidermied, the Natural History Museum has been quietly getting into cutting edge technology in recent years, with the launch of its Visions of Nature AR experience and immersive film Our Story with David Attenborough. Now it takes a further step into the 21st century via a new collaboration with the popular international virtual gaming chain Sandbox VR (which has three branches in London).

The city has such a bounty of world-renowned institutions that it can be hard to know which to visit first: from cutting-edge London exhibitions at the Tate Modern to Hope, the huge skeleton of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum.

“You're literally touching another planet. It can be quite a profound moment if you take time to appreciate it, touching a lump of stone.”

Richard Fortey, UK palaeontologist, extensively researched trilobites and their ecology, revealing insights about their distribution and using them to track continental positions.