Dino snores! More! More!

Friday night was all about dinosaurs, insect sex and arthropod cuisine.

Let me explain.

The Natural History Museum in London was hosting one of its occasional Dino snores sleep-over events and I was invited to come along and join in by my friend Dr Erica McAlister. She's curator of flies at the NHM and a fantastic science communicator (here's her blog).

There are two types of Dino snores events; one for kids, one for adults. At the kids' event, some 500 tiny excited persons cram into the dinosaur hall to sleep (or not) in the shadow of the iconic Dippy the Diplodocus (I have an interesting connection to her. See here). They're also entertained with talks, activities and stories. The adult event is much the same; there are just fewer attendees (the practicalities of space), and the talks and activities are more grown up. Plus, there's a three course meal. Or four, if you count the insects. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

I arrived at 7.30pm at the grand entrance in Cromwell Road and there was already a queue. Some had embraced the 'fun' aspect of the event and had turned up in their onesies.

After a while we all traipsed inside and this is when the seasoned campaigners had the advantage over us newbies. They headed straight for the many alcoves dotted around the outside of the grand hall, ensuring some small degree of privacy during the night. The rest of us slapped our foreheads and set up camp around Dippy herself. Then, naturally, we hit the bar.

Several drinks later we were given a very nice three course meal and a more detailed description of the events we could look forward to. Oh, and a list of things we shouldn't do such as roaming off around the museum and touching things we shouldn't touch - including each other. To be honest, I don't think that sex was uppermost in most people's minds, especially given the huge doses of garlic the chefs added to the food.

There were raffles and prize-givings too and I got the chance to meet some of the people who'd be entertaining the crowds. First off was the extraordinary Luis V Rey, one of my favourite palaeo-artists and illustrator of countless dinosaur books, many of which I own. I'm a huge fan; his reconstructions are always dynamic and ground-breaking in terms of his use of colour and texture for dinosaur skin, feathers etc. but are always based on good science. He was way ahead of other palaeo-artists in adding wattles and crests to his dinos; something that has been recently confirmed as true. His blog is wonderful. Such a nice man too.

 

 

Then there was the aforementioned Erica (seen here with Luis' partner Carmen) who would later tell us all about insect how's-yer-father, and the ever-splendid Simon D Watt.

 

You may recognise Simon as one of the presenters of the TV series Inside Nature's Giants. He's also a great stand-up, a brilliant science communicator and the brains behind the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. His shows are a glorious mixture of science and comedy.

Food (and garlic) over, we then peeled off in different directions to watch the various events. I chose to watch Erica's talk and Luis's 'How to draw dinosaurs' talk. Sadly, this meant that I missed Simon's (Sorry!) but I've seen him speak many times before (he also performed at the live Museum Of Curiosity show we staged at the NHM in 2012) and I know he'll have been brilliant. Erica, as usual, regaled us with hilariously grotesque tales of traumatic insemination, insatiable weevil sex maniacs, female penises and plugging genital orifices with your head. The world of insect sex is nothing if not enertaining. Then Luis showed us all the process for putting the meat on the bones when drawing dinosaurs. Great talks, both.

As the clock approached Midnight, it was time for a feast ... of edible insects. Now, this is a subject I've written and spoken about many times, most notably here on one of my vodcasts. It bugs me (sorry) that so much edible protein is scurrying, flying, skittering, crawling and sliding across this planet and yet people are starving. It's madness. Even more annoying is the fact that insects are very tasty when prepared properly. Frankly, I can't see much difference between a handful of salty, crispy mole crickets and a handful of salted crispy wheat snacks. Both taste great.

 

Insects alone (I'm not counting any other invertebrates) make up a huge proportion of the planet's total biomass; ants and termites alone make up over a quarter. There are, at this moment, around 200,000,000 insects for every human on Earth (A recent article in The New York Times claimed that the world holds 300 pounds of insects for every pound of humans). There is no reason why anyone in the world should be hungry.

 

I do accept that image is everything. The wasabi-flavoured giant Chinese water bug was delicious but I can understand why someone would be daunted by its size and appearance (though the guy in the photo wasn't). But there's no reason why food manufacturers couldn't disguise the insects in some way. Most people looking at a packet of oaksmoked breaded Wiltshire ham don't think 'slices of pig muscle' do they?

 

Bug-munching done, it was time to listen to the gentle strains of a live harpist and snuggle down for the night in our sleeping bags and camp dragon onesies. Or, as some others did, watch monster movies all night.

The event ended with a fried breakfast, a fond farewell to Dippy the Diplodocus and gtting out of the building before the hordes of tourists arrived. What a fun event.

Fancy going to a future one? Here's the site. It's not cheap but, remember, you do get a really very good three course meal, breakfast, live shows and other entertainment. It's cheaper than a night at the theatre, a meal and hotel. And you're sleeping in one of the world's most beautiful and iconic buildings.

What's not to love?

I'm definitely going again.

Meanwhile ... do follow these lovely people on Twitter: @SimonDWatt and @FlygirlNHM (Erica). Luis isn't on Twitter yet but you can visit his blog.

Bone 37: The Tale of a Dinosaur's Tail (Revisited)

I first posted some of this story back in 2010 on my old blog. I figured it was time for an update. So I've re-written and expanded it to bring it bang up-to-date ...

If you visit London's famous Natural History Museum almost the first person or thing you come face to face with is Dippy the Diplodocus.

'Dippy', I should explain, is the nickname of one the museum's oldest and most impressive residents. It's the massive black skeleton of a Diplodocus that dominates the main hall. Dippy isn't actually a true fossil; she's a casting made from plaster, coal dust and paint and she's been at the NHM since May 12th 1905. She's also a bit of a jigsaw having been made from parts of five unrelated Diplodocus skeletons. The original, if you can call it that, is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other copies are displayed all over Europe and South America making Dippy probably the most visited dinosaur skeleton(s) in history.

I'm often at the NHM and, recently, have been there a lot - especially when Dan Schreiber and I were writing the live Museum of Curiosity show that we staged in Dippy's hall last Autumn (see here). Whenever I do visit, I always say hello to Dippy. And as I get to her long, sinuous tail I usually stop and look up and count the bones starting from the tip. The bones here are small, the size and shape of cocktail sausages, but they soon start to get bigger. By the time I pass Bone 30, they are the thickness of a grown man's arm. And then I reach Bone 37. It's a very special bone for me. And that's because I made it. Here it is:

It's quite humbling to walk along the length of this creature - all 105 feet of it - and realise that it was not, by any measure, the largest of the dinosaurs. Some of its cousins, such as the extraordinary Amphicoelias, may have been close to twice as long - and maybe the largest animal to have ever lived. Just to give you some idea, the Diplodocus is the green dino in this diagram. Amphicoelias is the red. Compare the size of the 6 feet tall human at bottom left.

For almost all of her afterlife, Dippy was displayed with her long tail dragging along the ground. Look in any dinosaur book published prior to around 1985 and that's what you'll see. Here's the wonderful Zdenek Burian's famous version:

When I was a kid, the dinosaur books told us that these huge sauropods couldn't even support their own body weight and lived in lakes (another Burian painting).

But that's the nature of studying dinosaurs; all of the fossils we have represent just a tiny, tiny window on their world. We probably will never get to see 95% of the species that existed back then. Therefore each new discovery sheds some new light. In just the past couple of decades, we've seen them change from lumbering, cold-blooded beasts into dynamic predators and herders, and we've found enough evidence to be pretty sure that modern birds are dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction event 65,000,000 years ago. Last year we even found dinosaur feathers trapped in amber. We've also brought the sauropods out of the swamps and lakes and lifted their tails off the ground. Dippy needed to do the same.

And so, in 1993, the NHM decided to raise Dippy's tail; no mean feat considering how many plaster bones were involved. In fact, the weight of the tail made it impossible and so a very good friend of mine, model maker and film special effects expert John Coppinger (website here), was given the job of moulding and recasting every single one in lightweight fibreglass and carbon fibre. John was, for many years, a model maker at the museum before moving into film. He was the man who sculpted Jabba the Hutt for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and many of the creatures in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element and the Harry Potter films. This, however, was a massive undertaking. I'm not sure exactly how many bones there were involved but they all had to be moulded, cast, fettled, painted and 'weathered' to match the rest of the existing skeleton. The largest bones, nearest the hips, were as tall as me. John was happy to accept some help from friends and colleagues, myself included. Here's a picture of another helper, Will, with just some of the smaller bones.

This picture below shows John (right) and the late and much missed Roy Hale (Left) mounting the new bones onto a rod that, to this day still supports the tail along with specially designed stand and a cable suspended from the high roof.

For my small part, I was involved in the making of about six or seven bones but Bone 37 was all mine. It was a very special project to be involved in and I look back on it with nothing but fond memories despite the resin fumes and endless repetition. And to help me to remember I have this most precious thing:

Yes, it's the original 105 year old Bone 37. The originals were so old and so fragile that many didn't survive the moulding process. The museum staff were prepared for that; it was a price they knew they'd have to pay. But at least the new fibreglass bones would be exact replicas and the moulds would allow future castings to be taken. Bone 37 did lose a chunk off one of its processes but survived its ordeal pretty well. And to my delight, the museum staff said that I could keep it. It's one of my proudest, if dullest, possessions. And, just recently, I took it back to the NHM to meet Dippy, 20 years since her tail was lifted. Here she is, reunited.

If I ever decide to do Mastermind, the closest thing I'll ever have to a specialist subject is dinosaurs. I love those beautiful great brutes, always have done and always will. As an 11 year old kid I came up to London from Cornwall on a school trip and my abiding memory of the event is being stunned, shocked and captivated by Dippy the Diplodocus. She inspired a life long interest in me. So it's nice to think that, in some small, tiny, glass-reinforced plastic way, I've helped Dippy to go on inspiring people into the 21st century.