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Born from a taxidermy hoarder: The museum owes its existence to Sir Hans Sloane, an 18th-century doctor who collected over 70,000 "curiosities"—from stuffed animals to human remains to dried plants. He basically filled his house with oddities and left them to the nation in 1753.
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🐘 The elephant that wouldn’t fit: When the collections moved to the first British Museum site, some of the specimens were so big (like stuffed elephants and whales) they wouldn’t fit through the doors. The solution? Store them in a damp shed, where many promptly rotted.
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🏰 A cathedral for nature: The grand South Kensington building, opened in 1881, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in Romanesque style. The architect hid little stone monkeys, lions, and lizards all over the façade—like a secret animal scavenger hunt carved into the walls.
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🦴 Diplodocus the diva: For over 100 years, the entrance hall was ruled by "Dippy," a 26-metre plaster cast of a diplodocus skeleton (a gift from Andrew Carnegie). He became so famous that replicas of him were shipped to museums around the world. Dippy was only meant to be temporary—but the public loved him too much to let him go.
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🦋 The museum that breathes: The museum houses 80 million specimens, but only a fraction are on display. Behind the scenes, there are endless “vaults” filled with jars of snakes, mummified bats, and butterflies so old their colours have changed over time.
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👑 A royal oddity: Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1881, but she refused to attend the opening. Why? She thought the museum’s collection of skeletons and taxidermy beasts was too morbid for her taste.
So in short: the Natural History Museum started out as one man’s overflowing cabinet of curiosities, had elephants that didn’t fit through doors, and now stands as one of London’s most whimsical palaces of science.
