Animal of the Week Jan 4, 2017—Deeply, Dippy

Many young children (and older children well into their "adulthood") over the past four decades have been stopped in their tracks when the first enter the Natural History Museum in London. Arrested by the hollow, timeless gaze and colossal magnificence of one of the world's most famous skeletons: Dippy the diplodocus. But as of today, no more.

After 111 years in the NHM, and 37 in the Hintze Hall (that wonderful cavernous atrium through which most visitors enter the museum), the 292 bones will be dismantled and packed up. The skeleton will be replaced, by something even more enormous: the skeleton of a blue whale. But for so many people, the departure of Dippy is a poignant change.

As a boy, I was struck by the wonder of intricate articulation, taking what seemed like hours to inspect every joint, picking out bumps, lumps, processess, textures, and, indeed, the wires that held the thing together. And later, after leaving the museum, in all my dinosaur books, the pages with the diplodocuses were always the best thumbed. I would gaze for hours at the pictures: great grey colossal hunks, but imagining, at the core of them all, the bones I had seen in the NHM. My long-lasting interest in dinosaurs, animals, zoology, and evolution, cannot solely be attributed to that skeleton, but by god it played its part. And later, when studying at the NHM, it was still a thrill for me to walk the length of the skeleton, from nose to the whipping pencil thin bones at the tip of Dippy's tail.

Of course, I've learned that the "bones" are actually casts of fossils. London's Dippy is one of ten replicas of fossils excavated in Wyoming in 1898. For all its size, Diplodocus carnegii (the species represented by the cast), which weighed around 16 tons and grew up to 25 m in length, was dwarfed by more recently described sauropod relatives: Argentinosaurus grew up to 40 m long and weighted perhaps 100 tons. But these facts do not lessen the wonder and awe inspired by that most loved fossil.

But, the departure is not the end: Dippy is going on a tour of UK museums form 2018–20, meaning more people in new settings will get to stare in wonder at the skeleton in new settings. And, well, having stood next to the skull of a blue whale, that is no less awe inspiring and much as I will remember that childhood thrill of seeing Dippy with nostalgic fondness, I can't wait to see the new Hintze Hall display.