PM at the NHM

31 May 2009

The second part of our afternoon at the Natural History Museum a couple of weeks ago was spent looking at the dinosaurs, mammals and the vault of shiny diamonds and other expensive rocks. That still leaves us with lots of other areas of the museum yet to explore, so maybe we’ll make a return visit sometime.

We visited the dinosaurs, wandering among prehistoric bones and trying not to think too much about how much it would hurt to be clamped between those jaws with those teeth. There was even an animatronic T. Rex which would shift about in the dim light and roar and grumble, the effect of which was occasionally shattered by a voice coming over the tannoy ordering people to move along the walkway. I still say that if you’re going to have an animatronic vicious carnivore in your museum, you should make its movements erratic and unpredictable so as to frighten the crap out of people. That’d keep them moving along the walkway.

At the end of the mammal section full of the cute and furry and the mind-bogglingly enormous whales there was a weighing machine that enabled you to compare your weight to a number of different mammals. I stepped up, still carrying a kilo or so of my camera and gubbins, pressed the button and waited a moment. The digital display showed 74 kilos. Hang on a minute, that’s about twice what I was expecting. Gales of laughter erupted behind me and I turned to find Lauren pressing her foot on the scale and not just Helen and Suzy, but a bunch of people I didn’t know laughing at my unexpected weight gain.

The nuisance took her foot off the machine and I tried again. 41 kilos. I chose a polar bear to compare our weights and Lauren read the result. “You weigh ten times a polar bear”.