Monkey at the Natural History Museum

Monkey-ing around at the Natural History Museum

Monkey is always wondering about how different life might have been if he wasn't such a cosmopolitan urban little fellow. Here he takes a cultural wander through the animal archives and tries to get back to his roots, back to nature, and even back in time... Off to the Natural History Museum we go! (click picture to enlarge)

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I arrive at the Natural History Museum in London on a beautiful summer day. The outside of the museum looks quite grand and bears a certain architectural resemblance to my house, but with less windows. Tourists around the outside of the building start to give me a few strange looks so I have to explain to them that I am a roving reporter for World of Monkey, and not an escaped exhibit. A lot of the tourists seem shocked at my level of intelligence and so I inform them that they are in exactly the right place to start learning about evolution and the monkey-human relationship. I am already considering the possibility of becoming a tour guide for the museum. Inside, a guard checks my bag, and finds only a camera, notepad and a banana. He smiles.

I stand in the front hall and think that I spy the security guard after me, but on second glance it turns out to be this whacking great Diplodocus skeleton, which is the longest complete dinosaur skeleton in the world. It was donated to the museum by Andrew Carnegie, and it celebrates it's 100th birthday this year. Hmm... Grandad is almost 100 years old, and he looks much healthier than this... and I thought that dinosaurs were a bit older than that...
I read the sign and find out that the skeleton was donated to the museum 100 years ago, and that this gigantic creature actually lived about 65 million years in the past - just a little bit older than Grandad then...

I decide to make my way through the dinosaur section of the museum, to see some other long-extinct beasts. I meet a man who explains to me that the word dinosaur actually means 'terrible lizard', which is actually inaccurate as they weren't lizards at all, and not all were big or terrible - some were even smaller than me! I see what I think is one of these small dinosaurs and try to hitch a lift on it's back. He's not very talkative, or fast, but he does have some very sharp horns. I decide to call him Spike' Spike turns out to only be a model of what was actually another huge dinosaur - the triceratops. He would actually have measured 30ft long! His head was the largest ever possessed by a land animal, but his brain was only the size of a walnut!

I give up on old Walnut-Brain due to his lack of conversational skills, and go to find someone who can tell me a bit more about dinosaurs and what became of them. As I walk past the huge skeletons of dinosaurs that have long since departed, I start to hear a load growling, and thinking it's my stomach I instinctively start searching for that banana I had packed. Immersed in the hunt for food I turn a corner and se this fellow, who also seems to be searching for his lunch! Worried that it might be monkey on the menu tonight I spot his weakness and challenge him to an arm-wrestle! The tyrannosaurus's arms were so puny that they couldn't even scratch their noses! Naturally, I win the arm-wrestle and T-rex spies some much tastier humans anyway.

I leave Twiglet-Arms behind and look for someone a bit friendlier. This is where I meet this pair of Deinonychus. At first I thought that they were laughing, but then I realised that the one on the left was trying to bite my ear off... A very handy sign warned me that this was one of the most ferocious pack hunters that ever lived - but thankfully they haven't been seen around these parts for about 115 million years.