In the heart of London is an incredible world.
The Natural History Museum,
home to 8O million sensations of nature -
from dinosaurs to whales, giant squid to billion-year-old rocks.
It's probably the most important fossil of a dinosaur
that there is anywhere in the world.
Now, our cameras have been allowed behind the scenes...
This rather large crate reminds me
of something from the movie Indiana Jones.
...to meet the team...
Geronimo!
...keeping it up and running...
I think they're gorgeous!
...welcoming up to five million visitors a year...
Hello, control. Are we ready to open the museum?
...and bringing its unrivalled treasures to life.
See those little faces? Aren't they cute?
You're looking at the backside of a maggot,
which always makes me giggle.
In this episode, an exciting new dinosaur is discovered.
We get to unwrap them and discover what's inside.
It's like Christmas.
Seven billion years old and from outer space...
So, this is the oldest thing that we have in the museum.
It's actually older than the solar system.
And hunting for bugs at Anne Boleyn's castle.
So, you want to beat the tree assertively
without thrashing all the branches and fruit off, of course.
Especially because it's somebody else's tree.
Here we go. To infinity and beyond.
This is the Natural History Museum as you've never seen it before.
The Natural History Museum's dinosaur collection is world-famous.
Thousands of visitors pour through its doors each day to see
the most incredible dinosaurs ever discovered -
from the first T-rex ever found
to the most complete stegosaurus skeleton in existence.
But behind the scenes,
there's a treasure trove of dino secrets yet to be revealed.
Susie Maidment is part of the museum's team of dinosaur experts.
And today, she's unlocking a store room that's strictly
off-limits to the public.
What you see upstairs is just a tiny fragment of
all the fossils that we have here.
Most of them are down here in this room,
where there are literally thousands of dinosaur specimens.
Here, in the bowels of the building,
she knows something special has been hidden away.
A crate from a famous dino dig in Lesotho, Africa...
It's really heavy!
...that has never been unpacked.
OK. So, you can see that we took this first plank off the box
and it's just full of these parcels that are wrapped up with these,
kind of, tantalising notes on the outside.
And we get to unwrap them and discover what's inside.
It's like palaeontology Christmas.
What else do I have in my Christmas stocking?
Ooh.
It's difficult to know whether some of these
have broken up as they've been in these boxes for so long...
...or whether they were broken when they found them.
So, this is one I'm really, really interested in.
To most people, this might just look like a lump of rock.
But to me, this is rather exciting.
Susie's expert eye has spotted that this small piece of rock
contains prehistoric dinosaur bones.
But finding out what type of dino they belong to
is going to be a challenge.
This bone is really, really old -
maybe as much as 199 million years old.
And there's more bone inside this rock.
We can't see the shape of that bone right now
but that's what we want to reveal.
Lesotho in Africa, where these rocks were found,
is famous for early and rare dinosaurs,
like heterodontosaurus and Lesothosaurus.
Susie's wondering if her rock contains bones from these creatures.
To solve the mystery,
she's using the museum's cutting-edge CT scanner.
I really hope that what we're going to see when we look at these
images on the screen is a beautiful dinosaur skull in three dimensions,
preserved in these blocks of rock, and that would really make my day.
Susie must wait until the rock's been scanned
and analysed to find out if it contains something special.
The Natural History Museum
is one of the most popular landmarks in London.
And keeping this 50-year-old building
sparkling for its millions of visitors is no easy job.
Who needs the gym, eh?
Specialist window cleaners Killian and Paul have the unenviable task
of washing the 5,000 individual panes of glass
that cover its facade.
We've been cleaning the windows here for about six years.
Probably the most important thing to wear when you're abseiling,
at least for comfort, is a seat.
So you get to sit down when you're working.
It's pretty much like working in an office, really.
Just really high up!
To get to the windows, the abseilers face a 100-foot drop.
Sometimes I do get a bit of a...
Bit of a pit in my stomach before going over the edge,
looking down and seeing how high it is.
Wish me luck.
Attaching yourself to a historic building can be a bit unnerving.
If we're anchoring off of something that we're only 99% sure
will hold, then I go first,
cos I'm fatter.
And that way, if it holds me, then it'll definitely hold him.
Every couple of months, I clean the windows at home.
I am actually quite bad on that.
I clean windows when my Mrs orders me to clean windows!
Oh, I just put my hand in spider webs or something.
Yep. Yep-
At this height, Killian and Paul
can get up close to the building's history.
The nice thing about being at the Natural History Museum
is that it's a really old building.
Many, many years ago, these handles here were used by window cleaners
to walk along the edges and clean the windows.
Like, before health and safety existed.
This building has really amazing carvings.
Some of them funny looking.
It's nice. We are the only people who get to see them this close.
Do you want to hear a joke?
You missed a spot.
Coming up - the museum's oldest exhibit.
So, there are tiny grains held within this meteorite
that are older than the moon and they're older than the Earth.
And they're actually older than the sun.
And the results are back from Susie's dino scan.
Look at that. This is great news.
At the Natural History Museum,
there's far more going on than the public get to see.
It's also home to over 300 experts,
who study the natural world in labs across its sites.
But much of their work takes place out in the field.
Today, beetle expert Max Barclay is taking a trip
to Hever Castle in Kent,
which is home to an amazing selection of bugs.
We're in the grounds of Hever Castle,
where natural history is going to meet real history.
Of course, Hever Castle is the childhood home
of Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth I.
But we're here to look at beetles.
There's a nice old orchard there with some apple trees
that look like they're a couple of hundred years old.
Likely to support some interesting beetles.
Max is taking part in a ground-breaking project
which involves collecting every species of beetle in Britain.
Today, he's hoping to find something new,
but it's no easy task.
What would really excite me today -
it'd be nice to see something I haven't seen before.
And there's 4,000 species of beetle in Britain.
I haven't seen all of them.
That is a beating tray.
Very simple - it's basically like an umbrella.
And you hold it underneath the branch
and then you hit the branch with a stick.
So, not very technical, really.
Have a look along the sides of the tree here,
have a look particularly at the mistletoe, which is interesting.
This tree is encrusted with lichen.
It's a very old tree, even though it's very small.
There's a couple of things on the beating tray there.
That's a beetle. Ladybirds are beetles, of course.
Max has been studying beetles for 25 years.
It's a lifelong passion that's taken him across the globe.
This net has been all over the world.
It's been all over South America, it's been in Brazil,
it's been up the Andes in Peru,
it's been in Central America in Belize.
It's been in North America as well.
There's some bloodstains there.
That's probably from leeches in Borneo.
So, you want to beat the tree assertively enough
that the insects are dislodged, without thrashing all the branches
and fruit off, of course.
Especially because it's somebody else's tree.
Any beetles?
The grounds here are old - they're as old as the castle, of course -
so you have some continuity of the habitat, and probably
the beetles here are the descendants of populations of beetles that were
here when Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were still living in the castle.
This is a shield bug. It's also called a stink bug.
When you handle them, if they get afraid or distressed they'll produce
a very strong almondy smell, which is why they're called stink bugs.
I don't like the smell at all, so I'm not going to handle it.
There's a flea beetle there.
Just put that in the tube.
And a caterpillar there that looks like a stick.
As you can see, it's doing quite a good job of it.
When you're collecting beetles in a historic orchard,
snack time is a simple affair.
These fruits that look like cherries...
It's not a cherry tree. Don't know what these fruits are.
Look at that. Some kind of little plums.
Bad habit tasting everything.
You don't want to do it in a tropical rainforest -
some of the things can kill you.
They're actually really nice.
I don't know why some people get creeped out by bugs, really.
I just think they haven't spent enough time looking at them.
It's been a successful day, and Max will now
return to the museum with his fresh haul of beetles.
Every year, the Natural History Museum holds its famous
competition of wildlife photography.
With almost 50,000 entries, it's the biggest of its kind
anywhere in the world, and the most prestigious.
The exhibition that reveals the winning photographs
is a highlight in the museum's calendar.
Today, programme manager Soraia Salvador and her team
are installing the top 100 photographs.
Be careful here!
But with opening day just a week away, time is tight.
This is a really exciting project and it's the result
of the work of so many people, and it's really beautiful to see.
This is the moment of truth.
Wow! Exciting.
So, these are the photos that people are gonna be
able to see in one week's time, here in the gallery.
These prints are really delicate - that's why you see us
using these gloves.
We go around...
Wow! This one is really spectacular, the colours.
OK. One, two, three.
An expert panel of judges selected these winning shots
and they are now being carefully mounted.
No, no.
For us, quality is everything.
Every time we put an image, we need to assess if it's best.
And this one, it's clearly not.
Here and here.
One, two, three.
It's bUmPY-
Each print is a challenge.
Not perfect, so we are not entirely happy.
Maybe it's catching some moisture.
Feeling a bit of pressure, because there's still a lot of work to do.
We have to install the images today.
Er, OK. Let's go to the next one.
One, two, three.
It's beautiful!
As it's the most popular event in the museum's calendar,
the gift shop is also in a rush to get
the new merchandise on the shelves in time for the grand opening.
Wildlife Photographer Of The Year tote bag.
It's a black bag. Who doesn't like a black bag?
I'm feeling great.
I mean, it's the final last five minutes
after seven months of hard work. It's fantastic.
The Natural History Museum is full of unique objects
that stretch thousands of years back in time...
...from prehistoric men to ancient insects and dinosaur fossils.
But, for Caroline Smith, who is a world authority on meteorites,
there's one object that beats everything else in the museum
hands down.
Kept tucked away,
she's one of the few members of staff who's allowed to handle it.
So, what I have in here, in this rather unassuming box,
is actually one of our treasures of the meteorites collection
and, indeed, of the museum.
This is quite a smelly meteorite.
I can smell it.
It has a very distinctive smell.
So, some people have described it
as smelling a little bit like gunpowder.
So, this is a meteorite called Murchison.
It fell in Australia in 1969 and even though it looks like just
a boring old lump of black rock,
it's much more interesting than that.
So, there are tiny grains held within this meteorite
that are older than the dinosaurs.
They're actually older than the moon and they're older than the Earth
and they're actually older than the sun.
So, there are some tiny grains held within this meteorite
that are as old as seven billion years old.
So, this is the oldest thing that we have in the museum.
It's actually older than the solar system.
Remarkably, meteorites like this one
could reveal how life on Earth first began.
We've always wondered how life started on Earth.
You know, it's one of those really big questions.
And what's so amazing about this meteorite is,
it's got all of the key building blocks that you need for life
to start held within it.
When you start taking them apart,
you start revealing that they're really amazing secrets.
They are like little time capsules and space probes.
Engine ignition. Two, one, zero.
And lift-off.
As a world authority,
Caroline has been recruited onto a very special project.
I've actually been working with colleagues from Nasa
for the last few years,
on the Nasa Mars 2020 mission, the Perseverance Rover.
She's given Nasa a meteorite from the museum's collection
that fell to Earth from Mars.
And now, that meteorite is on board the Rover,
on its way back to the red planet.
Another piece of this rock that I'm holding is currently
winging its way back to Mars on a 100-million-mile journey,
and it's got a very important job to do.
So, not all of our collection is currently in the building.
Some of it is elsewhere and some of it is, indeed, in space.
This meteorite will help Nasa's mission to discover
whether there's life on other planets.
To be involved in that mission, even in a very small way,
is super-exciting.
That is the hairs standing up on the back of the neck
and the, sort of, butterflies going in the stomach.
Dinosaur expert Susie Maidment has been waiting for the results
from the CT scan of a mysterious lump of prehistoric rock
that was found in Africa.
And today, the results have come through.
She's hoping they'll reveal that the rock has rare dinosaur bones inside.
There you go. Oh, wow!
We've got a lot of detail here, which is really nice.
From first glance, it's promising.
This is great news. This is really good.
To Susie's expert eye, it looks like the rock contains
an incredible discovery - an extremely unusual dinosaur skull.
Is this a brain case here, do you think? Look.
Here's the back of the skull. Looks like it, yeah.
And then these are the two processes that are
sticking down from the bottom of the brain case. Mm.
So, I think we've got the back of the skull here.
I think this should make this identifiable.
So, hopefully, from this we'll be able to tell
what sort of dinosaur it is.
To find out for certain what's hidden inside,
Susie is now enlisting fossil expert Mark Graham.
She wants him to chisel away at the hard rock
and expose the fossil skull beneath without damaging it.
Only then will she be able to identify
whether this really is a rare dinosaur.
I've got some specimens for you. Fantastic.
So, these are the little skull blocks from Lesotho
that we've CT scanned.
This is really spectacular. Oh, good.
So, as you can see, there is a lot of bone in it. Yep.
But what the CT scan shows
is that it really looks very promising as a skull.
This is brilliant, isn't it? It looks quite exciting, doesn't it?
It does. It looks fantastic, yeah.
And then I think with that much skull material, we should
be able to identify it. This is beautifully preserved. Isn't it?
The more I look at this and the more I look at the scans,
the more I'm convinced it's a small dinosaur.
I'm pretty excited. I think this is gonna be very cool
and I can't wait to see what we get out of it.
Exposing the bone from the rock is painstaking work
and will take weeks to complete.
Susie will now have to wait before the mystery of the skull
in the rock can finally be solved.
Coming UP---
Max uncovers an ancient secret.
These beetles were alive
when the pharaohs were building the pyramids in Egypt.
It's tremendously exciting.
And Susie gets special access to a museum treasure.
They're virtually priceless, so it's pretty exciting
to be able to get my hands on them.
Susie Maidment and her team are working to uncover
a dinosaur skull from a prehistoric rock.
And while she waits for the result,
Susie's been given special access to the remarkable fossils
that sparked the discovery of the dinosaurs.
I've never got to handle these specimens before.
They're absolutely iconic specimens for dinosaur workers.
The first dinosaur fossils recognised as such.
So it's pretty exciting to be able to get my hands on them.
These small pieces are dinosaur teeth and they're extraordinary.
They were discovered by accident in 1822 in Sussex,
by a local doctor whose wife saw them glinting
by the side of the road.
This chance find kick-started one of the biggest
discoveries in natural history -
that dinosaurs once walked the Earth.
It's incredibly difficult to put a value on these specimens,
because of their incredible historic importance to palaeontology.
They're virtually priceless.
We will never be able to find the first dinosaur fossils ever again.
In 1822, nobody knew about dinosaurs.
There had been dinosaur fossils found before then
but people had thought that they were the bones of giant humans
and mythical animals and things like that.
After this discovery, people were then able to look at fossils
and look at bones with a new set of eyes,
and that led to an explosion in dinosaur research
and study and discovery.
The Natural History Museum has 28 galleries
and 450 interactive exhibits to entertain adults and children alike.
Looking after them is a task that falls
to special-effects engineer Chris Russell.
I've been here for quite a long time now, so I know
most of the behind-the-scenes parts of the museum.
Each morning, Chris and his team have 60 minutes
to get everything up and running.
So, it's really just going round switching everything on,
then going round the front, checking that everything's working properly.
And slowly, the museum comes back to life every morning.
This is the earthquake floor. I'm actually just waiting
for the floor to start moving,
which it is now. And I'm just going to make sure
that all of these barriers are secure.
Yep, that's all looking good.
But today, Chris has saved his most special task until last.
He's installing one of the most extraordinary jewels
in the whole museum.
Known as the Ostro Stone,
it's the largest blue topaz gemstone in the world.
Found over 30 years ago, it weighs 2kg
and is over 9,000 carats.
We're in the Minerals Gallery, one of the oldest-style galleries
in the museum, and we're looking at the Ostro Stone.
It's one of the largest specimens of its type in the world
and was found in the Amazon rainforest.
We've just been putting the gemstone back onto public display
and then adjusting the lighting on it to bring out the best aspects
of the stone, so that as the visitor looks at the stone,
the lighting changes and you can just see different colours
that come through and different patterns
as the light refracts through the stone.
Gemstones come in all different shapes, sizes and different colours,
and this is one of the most amazing ones we've got in this gallery.
Really, really beautiful.
Natural History Museum beetle expert Max Barclay looks after
one of the biggest beetle collections in the world.
We have one of the largest, one of the oldest
and the most comprehensive collections of its kind
anywhere in the world.
We have here about 22,000 boxes of beetles
containing about eight million specimens.
One of my favourite things is in this cabinet.
So, these are the gold and silver chafers
from the cloud forests of Central America.
These have been called bling beetles.
We think they're trying to look like droplets of water,
so that they can hide from the birds and monkeys.
This is the biggest beetle in the world,
and this piece is called Titanus gigantius.
These can get to about 16 or 17 centimetres long,
so they're bigger than your hamster, they're bigger than your budgerigar.
Recently, Max found a remarkable pair of beetles
hidden away in the collection.
They could be some of the oldest complete beetles ever found.
Well, this is one of the most incredible things in the collection,
to my mind.
This is a piece of wood that was dug up in the 1970s
on a farm in eastern England.
And in one of these channels, the farmer who dug it up,
he found some dead beetles and they're here.
So, he brought these into the Natural History Museum
and the scientists who were here at the time said,
"Well, this is not a British species of beetle."
So, there was always a mystery about these beetles -
what were they doing here? Why were they here?
What were they doing in that bit of wood?
And, er, so it was put into a drawer in the museum and it was left,
really, for 30 or 40 years.
The beetles lay undisturbed in the museum's vaults
until Max came across them several years ago.
He suspected the reason they were so puzzling was because they were
incredibly old and were now extinct in the British Isles.
Well, I decided that we were going to find out once and for all
how old these specimens were.
So we sent some tiny samples of these beetles
and of this piece of wood off to be carbon dated.
The results have just come back.
And they're remarkable.
Just got the results back from this,
and that's quite interesting
because we always suspected that they were old.
But, actually, these beetles
are older than the Tudors,
older than the Roman occupation of Britain,
even older than the Roman Empire.
These beetles were alive and chewing the inside of that
piece of wood when the pharaohs were building the pyramids in Egypt.
They are 3,875 years old.
It's tremendously exciting.
Max believes these oak capricorn beetles died out
in Britain as the climate changed.
So, this is a beetle that's associated with warmer climates.
And possibly, it existed in Britain 4,000 years ago
because the climate was warmer.
And as the climate cooled and habitats were destroyed,
it became extinct.
It's quite extraordinary to realise that you're holding
something in your hand that looks like it
was collected yesterday and it's actually several millennia old.
It's quite remarkable.
Max's ancient beetles will now go on display in a major exhibition.
Being selected as one of the 100 winning photos to go on display
at the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year is a huge honour.
Many of the chosen pictures were taken in remote locations,
but British photographer Matt Moran took his picture
just ten minutes from his house in North London.
Here we are at the allotment,
where I've been coming for the past four years photographing the foxes.
And just a little bit further up ahead here was where
I took a picture of the rat game.
For Matt, having one of his pictures chosen is a dream come true.
I've been entering the competition for the past 18 years and I always
thought the answer was just to go abroad and to exotic locations.
And here we are on a north-London allotment.
And this time around, I got lucky one night.
There were a few just hanging out,
so I got my camera out and it was
while I was lying on my front
a fox just exploded out from my right-hand side.
There was a fleeting glimpse right in front of the lens.
They were tossing the rat up in the air.
It was entertaining to watch.
It was just these three foxes trying to gain ownership of the rat.
And that's when I started to frame and just really fire away.
Steam was coming out of my camera
and I knew that I'd got to get this moment, I'd got to get this shot.
I reviewed the pictures quickly
and I could see there's one shot on the back of my camera.
And I zoomed in and saw it was sharp and I was like, "Yes!
"L've got it. I've got something really good here."
I think if you ask any photographer, including myself,
the one competition they want to have their work in,
it would be the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.
It's like the equivalent of winning the World Cup.
Behind the scenes of the museum, you won't just find rare specimens.
There's also a vast library and archives holding over 300,000
spectacular illustrations and artworks of the natural world -
all cared for by specialist collections manager Andrea Hart.
But the crown jewel of this collection
is a book on American birds.
It contains over 400 hand-coloured prints,
capturing wildlife as never seen before.
A rare copy recently sold at auction for £7 million,
making it one of the world's most expensive books.
OK, so, this is one of the heaviest volumes in the library
but it's also one of the biggest treasures that we have, as well.
This is john James Audubon's Birds Of America,
first printed in 1827, and it is just full of
the most amazing birds that he captured, in watercolour.
And the most incredible thing is that they are all life-size.
You can just see that these were almost painted yesterday,
instead of nearly 200 years ago.
So, today, I'm having a look through the volumes to choose another
plate that we can put on display for the public to come and see.
So, I think this one is going to be the next one to go into the gallery.
The images are so sensitive to light damage that each one
can only be on show for a limited time.
So, we're in the Treasures Gallery, one of my favourite
galleries at the museum, and about to swap one treasure for another.
So, the tricky thing with these is that they are
so big that you do have to take extra care when removing them.
So it's always a relief when you get that out cleanly in one go.
This is one of my favourite ones, I think, particularly
because owls are one of my mum's favourite birds.
And hopefully, we'll get it all in one go.
There we go.
Love this one, cos it really does look like the owls
are really looking back at you.
But, anyway, I'm going to close them up, leave them in there...
...until the next time.
See you in a month.
In his lab, fossil expert Mark Graham has been chiselling away
at the piece of rock given to him by dino expert Susie Maidment.
A CT scan suggested there was part of a rare dinosaur skull
hidden inside.
But it will only be through Mark's painstaking work that
the fossil will be revealed.
I'm getting rid of this crud, really.
The trouble is, the bones are lovely but to get to them
you've got to remove all this... It's just, sort of, crap.
It takes forever to do it because it's so hard, so...
Just got to be patient, keep at it
and eventually, we'll get through to the good stuff.
One wrong slip could destroy a 199 million-year-old fossil
that can never be restored.
One of the things I worked on took about nine years to do,
so that's an example of how long it can take around here
to make progress on some stuff.
It is a very, very distinct and strange job, really.
So I don't know - I'm probably a bit of a weirdo.
Most people would probably tell you that, but, er, I enjoy it,
so I don't give a toss, really.
For Mark, working at the museum is the best job in the world.
If I'd seriously thought at six years old
that I would have been working here, I would have been so excited.
You know, I would have wanted to grow up really quickly.
You could look back and pinch yourself
and think, "How did I get here?" I still do that now.
It's certainly a good party stopper. You go to a party and someone says,
"What do you do for a living?"
I say, "Well, I work with dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum."
So, they all think it's really pretty cool.
After weeks of careful scraping,
Mark's hard work is finally paying off.
The fossil skull is starting to emerge.
You know, some people who don't know would look at this
and think it's just a lump of old rock
with a couple of knobbly bits sticking out of it.
But it actually represents something really important,
because there's a dinosaur skull in here.
And not only that - it's going to be a really,
really rare dinosaur skull, so I'm super-excited to get this job done.
Coming UP---
Here it is.
...the museum's major exhibition goes live.
It feels a little bit surreal, actually,
looking at your work up here.
And the fossil skull is finally revealed.
This dinosaur is really, really quite rare.
This is a significant discovery.
It's just a few clays
before the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year exhibition
finally opens to the public.
The winning entries for each category have been unveiled...
...including the competition's overall winner -
this Siberian tiger,
captured in the Russian far east by Sergey Gorshkov.
British photographer Matt Moran's picture
received a "highly commended" in the mammal-behaviour category.
Today, he's getting his first glimpse of his photograph
in the exhibition.
Here it is.
It feels a little bit surreal, actually,
looking at your work up here, you know, amongst all of this
amazing selection of images from all over the world.
I took this photo over a year ago now and it's just amazing
to be able to stand in front of this moment that I remember so well.
I'm definitely proud of myself,
because I've been entering this competition for 18 years.
So, to be able to finally have my own panel up here
with an animal that's just ten minutes' walk from my house
is absolutely magnificent.
This is the Holy Grail, for sure.
Every visitor walks beneath the museum's spectacular
hand-painted ceiling, but very few people have ever been up close.
Today, botanist Sandy Knapp is going to inspect
this unexplored treasure for herself.
I love this building and I actually love this ceiling
and I'm so lucky, cos every single day I get to walk through
those doors, I get to walk across this hall,
look up and see all these amazing plants arched above me.
It's something that starts every day with a lift.
Hi, Tom. This is so exciting.
Sandy is hoping to identify key features on the paintings...
...that can't be seen from the ground.
I'm getting to go up in this cherry picker to get closer to this
amazing ceiling than I've ever been before,
which has been one of my dreams for many, many years.
Whoo!
Incredible.
The 60-foot-high ceiling is made up of 180 panels,
intricately decorated with plants from across the world.
Can you imagine putting all this decoration in a place where
no-one is ever gonna see it?
Those flowers are beautifully done in gilt,
so it's hugely detailed, which you kind of don't see
from down there but I can see it for the first time here.
No-one knows for certain why these particular plants were chosen.
But now she's up close, Sandy has spotted that some of these panels
appear to tell a story of the British Empire.
A few of the plants here on the ceiling are those plants
that fuelled the British economy in the Victorian times.
So, they were things like cotton and tobacco and tea,
which were the real crops which brought in money.
They also were involved with a lot of misery for the people who
harvested them, enslaved people, and whose lands were taken,
but that was how the British Empire was made.
It's like a hidden treasure in plain view, isn't it?
You know, you only see it when you look up.
It's a work of art.
In a way, this is our version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
But I kind of like it better.
It is AMAZING!
It's been six weeks since Susie Maidment handed over
a seemingly unremarkable lump of rock to fossil expert Mark Graham.
Today, he's finally ready to share
the results of his hard work with her.
Oh, my goodness. You've done so much to it. Yeah.
Turned out really well. Oh, yes.
So, the back of the skull's come out nicely.
So, I used the air abrasive just to remove that,
kind of, rock that was over there.
That's beautiful. It's a beautifuljob, though.
Considering this is 200 million years old... Yeah.
...it is really well preserved, isn't it? It is. It's lovely.
I'm really confident that we're gonna be able to identify this.
Brilliant. Thank you very much, Mark. It's lovely. Yeah, no problem.
See you later.
With her newly prepared dinosaur skull in hand,
Susie is now ready to work out what it could be.
The rock contained a small piece from the back of the skull.
It's not much but it's enough for Susie to identify it.
I'm really excited to look at this fossil now.
Mark has done such a beautifuljob on it.
It is not a whole skull but the vast majority of dinosaurs are known
from just a few bones, and specimens like this have the potential
to reveal all sorts of information that we didn't already know.
The skull was found in Lesotho in Africa,
which narrows the field down.
But to find out for certain what kind of dinosaur it is,
Susie must examine key features in the fossil and compare it
to similar skulls in the museum's collection.
After hours of analysis, she thinks she can finally identify
what kind of dinosaur the skull belonged to.
I'm quite excited by this specimen.
I think I can be quite confident what it is, which is always nice.
So, the shape of the bones from our skull are really similar
to those of this dinosaur here, which is called Lesothosaurus.
Lesothosaurus is an early, and rare, dinosaur.
I think that we can say with a lot of likelihood
that this is Lesothosaurus.
So, this dinosaur is 200 million years old.
Now, if you think about it, that is
140 million years older than T-rex.
So, this was already a fossil by the time T-rex lived.
And that's really, really exciting for me
because it's the group of dinosaurs that I work on and this is...
This is kind of where it all started for those dinosaurs.
This is the back of the skull, so this is, kind of, this part here.
And this is the eye socket, so that bit there.
And then its snout probably would have been over here.
Now, the whole animal was about the size of a Labrador,
and it had a stiff tail held out to the back, it walked on two legs
and it had short forelimbs that it used to pull food to its mouth.
It would have eaten ferns and mosses
and there were no flowering plants around at the time.
This dinosaur is really, really quite rare.
There are maybe only 20 specimens of Lesothosaurus
anywhere in the world, and there's fewer skulls than that.
So, any skull material of this dinosaur is really, really important
to us, to help us to understand the anatomy of these animals.
Even with ten million fossils,
for experts at the Natural History Museum,
there's always something new to learn.
People might think that we already know everything there is
to know about dinosaurs.
But, actually, the truth is, we've only just scratched the surface.
Every single fossil that we find
tells us new information about dinosaurs.
And this one here has the potential to really help us
understand about the early evolution
of some of the most exciting and interesting dinosaurs.
This is a significant discovery, and a significant find.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media