Hereby hangs a tail
PICK OF THE DAY
HORIZON: DIPPY AND THE WHALE BBC2, 9pm
BONE by painstaking bone, the iconic Dippy the Dinosaur skeleton has been removed from its long standing home at London’s Natural History Museum.
Now Dippy – which is not an actual fossil, but a plaster replica – has been sent off on a national tour, hitting the road like a pop star.
And in his place? The real skeleton of a blue whale (the world’s biggest animal), positioned hanging in a lunge diving pose. They are the bones of a young female blue whale which was beached off the coast of Ireland 126 years ago. And she will be unveiled at the museum tomorrow.
Of course the controversial switch caused some complaints, but the idea is to focus on the future and care of the natural world, rather than focusing on the past.
And from the looks of this fascinating behind-thescenes film, it really wasn’t an easy move. Imagine the nightmare of taking apart and putting together an Ikea wardrobe – but a million times worse and spread over two years. The thought of it makes you want to sit down in a dark room and cry.
Narrator Sir David Attenborough says: “Since 1979, Dippy the Diplodocus has been one of the museum’s most adored attractions.
“But in 2015 the museum decided to call time on Dippy. The new star attraction has been there gathering dust for more than 100 years. But getting it there would be a truly extroardinary engineering challenge.”
And it’s a marvel to watch as we find out just how you move the biggest skeletons on Earth.
From the woman responsible for cleaning every one of the whale’s 220 bones, to the engineering team who built the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, now building the whale’s steel support structure – we meet a phenomenal team.