Mysteries of the Natural History Museum- Hope the Whale, Dinosaurs & Ancient Discoveries

In the heart of London is an incredible world, the Natural History Museum, home to 80 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... Who's a good boy? I think they're gorgeous. ...welcoming up to 5 million visitors a year... Hello, Control. Are we ready to open the museum? ...and bringing its unrivaled treasures to life. So, this is the oldest thing that we have in the museum. It's actually older than the solar system. In this episode, the museum prepares for its biggest ever exhibition. You've got Wizarding World and magic, and you've got a dinosaur. What else do you need? A major new investigation about its star attraction... I've just taken a look at the results and processed what's come back. I'm incredibly excited by this. ...and getting up close and personal with some of the museum's strangest specimens. See those little faces? Aren't they cute? So, you're looking at the backside of a maggot, which always makes me giggle. Here we go, to infinity and beyond. This is the Natural History Museum as you've never seen it before. The Natural History Museum holds the greatest natural history collection in the world. Thousands of visitors flood through its doors each day to see everything from dinosaurs to dodos, sea monsters to giant sloths. And the star attraction that draws the biggest crowds is Hope, a giant skeleton of the largest mammal on Earth, the blue whale. The first time people come in and they see her diving down towards them, there's a lot of wow moments. And the children are great, they're like... Every visitor to the museum will pass under this 4.5-tonne, 25-metre-long skeleton. And checking she's safe to hang high over their heads is a crucial job that can only happen out of hours. It won't be a good look, Rob, if you crash into it, OK? I'm just saying. Today, a team of specialists are checking her over. Big bit coming, look. Ooh, look at that. Led by Head of Conservation Lorraine Cornish. As you can appreciate, access to Hope is very challenging for us. She looks magnificent, but looking after her takes a little bit more time and thought. When you're 130 years old, like Hope, your skeleton is fragile, so needs to be kept under constant watch. We go through the whole length of the skeleton, bit like a medical record, where you check through, and then an inspection. Just less is more. I just need him to make sure less is more, all right? No more, Rob. Back off. As soon as they get up close, the team spot that Hope needs attention. Underneath the skull in the palate area, there's quite a few cracks. And on some of the vertebrae, they're quite large and heavy. They've got some cracks and joins. Are they opening up any more? Are they stable? They now have just three days to check over 200 bones to make sure she's secure. Even though Hope's been in the museum for over a century, very little is known about her life. But that might all be about to change. Behind the scenes, hundreds of world-class experts are uncovering secrets about the natural world. Richard Sabin has been the museum's whale specialist for the past 29 years. And he's embarking on a new investigation into Hope. Now, this rather large crate, which reminds me of something from the movie Indiana Jones, actually contains a surprising part of Hope. The crate contains parts from Hope's vast mouth. This is the filter mechanism, the strainer that blue whales have inside their mouths to strain their food from the ocean. Things like krill, small fish. We've got about 800 of these inside this crate, and this isn't something that people get to see. This is something that scientists get to play with. And I'm in a very privileged position. You know, we've had Hope in our collections for just under 130 years, and she's effectively been a mystery for most of that time. I've made it my personal mission to basically become a detective and find out as much information as possible about Hope's life, to add flesh, if you like, to the bones, to really develop that story. Today, Richard's taking tiny samples from Hope's mouth plates, which will be analysed using cutting-edge techniques to reveal new information about her life. This is where it starts to look a little bit like I'm a drug dealer. This may just look like dust, but actually, it's very important dust. And we've developed techniques now that allow us to extract very, very detailed information using chemical analysis from these individual plates. And this will be used to answer more questions about Hope's life. Richard is hoping the samples will tell him exactly where Hope lived and how far she travelled. But first, they must be sent to a specialist lab before he gets his answers. The Dinosaur Gallery is one of the most popular and terrifying spaces in the museum. Housing skeletons of T-Rex and Triceratops, alongside life-size animatronic models. So, if something goes wrong, it's a big problem. This morning, engineers Alex and Glenn have had an urgent call-out to one of the malfunctioning robotic dinosaurs. So, this one, we think, needs to have the back of his neck looked at to you. There are a lot of children who are genuinely terrified of these things. You know, recently, these models were taken down into our workshops and had the fur and the feathers added, rather more like the fluffy toys we sell in the gift shop. It's really coming in. The motor in its neck has stopped working, and now the dino's head won't move properly. To avoid some very disappointed kids, it's crucial they get it up and running before the museum opens for the day. We've got deadlines to stick to here. We've got the public in in half an hour, so we've got to get this down into the workshop and have a closer look. Dino delivery. We're going to find a place to put her and wake her up. Can you make this part move, Glenn? Do the head turn, that one. Alex and Glenn need to open her up. Dino vet is one of the descriptions of my job. Children come to the museum and expect to see them working. It's a big disappointment when they're not. It's one of the things that people complain about if the dinosaurs are not working. Fortunately, with a spanner, a spare part, and a bit of elbow grease... Right, let's get it back upstairs. ..the dino is up and running again. Try and have it running before 10. He says he feels better. Well, that's a job well done. Children will be in in half an hour. Back to terrifying the kids. Coming up, Lorraine is up against it. This is where the magic is going to happen. This is where the exhibition is going to be. And the world's most prized dinosaur fossil. I'm a little bit scared to touch it. It's just absolutely priceless. It's impossible to put a value on this specimen. The Natural History Museum is gearing up for the biggest exhibition it's ever held. Fantastic Beasts, The Wonder of Nature is inspired by the famous movie and the museum needs it to be a huge hit. They'll be displaying fantastical creatures from the film, alongside some of the real-life animals that inspired them. This is where the magic is going to happen. This is where the exhibition is going to be. But time is tight for Head of Conservation Lorraine Cornish, who has just weeks before it's set to open to the public. So now we're ready to start installing over 120 objects. It will take six people a month to do that. So everyone's getting all the specimens ready and then this space will be so busy with people right up to the 11th hour normally. Literally the night before, we're usually still doing things. Today, Lorraine is getting her first peek at some very special items from the film that have just arrived from Warner Brothers. With thousands of fans expected to visit the exhibition, it's vital that everything is in perfect condition and it doesn't disappoint. These are super special, so I want to make sure that we're looking after them. This very large, odd-looking thing is the horn of an erumpent, which is one of the fantastic beasts in the film. And we're just checking it over to make sure everything's as it should be. There are some cracks here, but they're deliberate. They're not ones I should be worried about, so that's OK. It's not every day you have the erumpent horn, though. Few people can say that. It's just great, it's such fun. The erumpent is one of the fantasy creatures that escapes from Newt Scamander's suitcase and is a bit like a magical rhinoceros. So this is Newt's suitcase and who wouldn't be excited at carrying it? So Newt Scamander is the main character and he's what's called a magizoologist. And he goes around the world and he looks for and studies fantastic beasts. Getting all this stuff out is like Christmas and birthday rolled into one. This is the wand for Newt Scamander. I so wish I had a magic wand. Sometimes I just want to say, exhibition ready. And it's done. Having unpacked today's movie props, Lorraine now has just over 100 to go, including the exhibition showpiece, a brand new dinosaur. The Natural History Museum is home to over 80 million different items, but its rarest are kept under lock and key, hidden away at the back of the museum's main hall in the Treasures Gallery. Today, one of the museum's dinosaur experts, Susie Maidment, has been granted special access to examine the most prized fossil in the entire museum. This is Archaeopteryx. It's probably the most important fossil of a dinosaur that there is anywhere in the world. And I'm a little bit scared to touch it. It's just absolutely priceless. It's impossible to put a value on this specimen. At 147 million years old, this bird-like dinosaur is so highly valued because it was the first fossil to reveal that every species of bird alive today evolved from dinosaurs. Susie's been at the museum for two years and is one of the very few experts allowed this close. She's making a record of the fossil for other specialists to study. It is a bit stressful being this close to it. This case is almost never opened. It's very, very exciting for me to be able to have my head inside it right now and to be able to get a really close look at this fossil without the glass in the way. Archaeopteryx was discovered in Germany in 1861 and has been at the museum for over 150 years. And it's the mix of its features that makes it so intriguing. This specimen has a number of characteristics of both dinosaurs and birds. We have these beautiful feathers, which are so characteristic of birds. We've also got a wishbone, which is a bone in the shoulder region which helps birds fly. And we've got a claw on the foot that allows birds to perch on branches. There are also a number of quite clearly dinosaurian-like features. You can see it's got a very, very long tail and we don't have tails in modern birds, that aren't just made of feathers. So, these sorts of features make it much more similar to dinosaurs than to birds. I think Jurassic Park has a huge amount to answer for our opinions about what dinosaurs look like. We tend to think of dinosaurs as being these kind of big, scaly, reptilian-like animals, but actually what we now know is that many of the meat-eating dinosaurs were feathered. And I think this kind of changes our opinion about what dinosaurs might have been like. They were probably very bird-like in their behaviour, and actually many of them we wouldn't have been able to distinguish from birds today. And I think when you look at some types of bird, if you've ever looked an ostrich in the eye, I think they look a bit like dinosaurs, actually. Everyone who works at the Natural History Museum has a favourite part of the collection, including housekeeping supervisor Debbie Marler. Hers are the ancient skulls and skeletons. We are now entering human evolution. This is my lovely heads. I think they're gorgeous. I mean, look at their lovely faces. Nice chiselled eyebrows. Nice dinky little ears. Very handsome. I'm giving them a lovely massage now, because they deserve it. It's my little salon. Debbie's favourite gallery displays skulls, skeletons and models of early humans, going back 7 million years. I think I do have a bit of a haircut. I'll have to tidy that up. A bit of beard needs doing. I think any barber would love to have him. He looks quite cheeky, actually. He's quite cheeky-chappy, isn't he? He's like, hey, baby. He's quite... Oh, yeah. I'm all right, aren't I? What do you think? He's one of them. Hey, look at me. He's definitely not my type, though. He can smolder as much as he wants. It's not working on me. Sorry, love. Should have jeans and T-shirt on. He'd be all right, then. Look, do that. Sense it. You should put big warming up before everyone comes in. Ready for everyone to come and have a good look at him now. In all his glory. Over in the museum's main hall, the conservation team have been investigating the cracks in Hope, the museum's 130-year-old blue whale. Now, Head of Conservation Lorraine is giving the museum's star exhibit a final inspection to ensure she's safe for the thousands of visitors who will walk underneath her. So, this will take me up, up and away. So that I can get up close and personal with Hope and have a look. Here we go. To infinity and beyond. I always worry that I'm going to go and hit her, but I know I won't. I don't mind heights, but this bit's quite wobbly. So, the height's all right, but then when it starts to wibble-wobble... ..it can be tricky. I'm looking at cracks. So, the mandibles are amazingly heavy and, if you can imagine, the structure is being supported. So, we're really looking at structural stability. We're just watching some of the historic, older cracks so that they're not opening up. We have to just make sure that we're happy with those cracks. They haven't opened any wider. That's why we take lots of pictures and just keep an eye on things. Fortunately, Hope's cracks haven't opened up and she can be passed as secure. Here we go. Job done for now. Lovely. Behind closed doors, whale expert Richard Sabin is trying to uncover the mysteries of Hope the blue whale's life. He's keen to find out exactly where Hope may have lived and how far she travelled. It's been weeks since he sent Hope samples for investigation. He's received the results and they're extraordinary. The analysis of the chemical make-up of Hope's mouthplates means he can now chart previously unknown details of where she migrated during the last few years of her life. What we're actually looking at here is Hope's journey. 1886 into 1887. This is the route that she would have took from the north between Iceland and Norway, south towards Cape Verde. Then we have her return journey. This is her going north again. We can see that every year, Hope was effectively doing a round trip from the feeding grounds in the north down to the warmer waters off the west coast of Africa. Looking at this distance on the map, you're talking about 6,000 miles in the space of a single year. That's remarkable for any animal, let alone an animal that's out in the ocean. The fact that I'm plotting a journey that was made by a blue whale over 140 years ago really does quite blow my mind, in all honesty. And to think that we could actually add information about her life in so much detail, it makes it very emotional. It's something that you don't normally encounter with museum specimens in natural history collections. But around two years before Hope died, the trail runs cold. In the penultimate year of her life, that's 1889 into 1890, the data become very, very unclear. She's still in these warmer waters off the west coast of Africa. And she stays there. And we don't really know why. This is where the real detective work comes in. Richard needs more tests to find out why Hope suddenly stopped migrating. The museum's biggest exhibits might pull in the crowns, but less than 1% of its collection is on display to the public. The rest is kept for research in special access areas like the cocoon, which is in the museum's west wing. The cocoon is crammed full of over 20 million specimens, including 2.5 million flies reserved for scientific research. Erica McAllister is one of the experts in charge of this collection, and flies are her life's obsession. Everyone who starts off on flies is like, I don't know how to pronounce that. My advice with a lot of scientific names is just go quickly. You can look at whales and they're great and they're fun, but I can go into my garden and I can see more mayhem and mischief there than I will by looking at a whale. Obviously I have a bent for slightly unusual and entertaining behaviours. Oh, look, look, look, here. See those little faces, aren't they cute? Can you see their little face? Not their face, obviously, that's their anal spiracles. So you're looking at the backside of a maggot, which always makes me giggle. Can you not see the little dot on top of the end of the pin? That's obviously a fully-formed adult fly. These are commonly called the no-seams, and there's a specific reason for that, because they are quite small. So that obviously is a pig's foot, but in it it's got loads of little holes where the fleas live. We get these in humans. So those romantic walks on the beach. Not so romantic when you've got a flea burrowing through your foot. And then this is a lovely example of the chicken flea, and they live in the lids of chickens. If you look on their eyelid, you can see little rows of tiny little fleas. This is quite amazing. It's got to be slightly itchy, I guess. So now I can use these to horrify you, which is great for education reasons. So, we have all these beautiful models. Erica's collection also includes some 90-year-old wax models that are supersized versions of the real specimens. I could show you my pubic lice in a minute. That is always a winner. Everyone has favourites, and the pubic lice are mine, because, you know, look at them. So here we have a head lice and a pubic lice, and I think it's pretty obvious which one is which. One lives on your head and your thorax. Your hair is slightly different there to your hair in your nether region. Therefore, their claws are shaped differently to hold on to different types of hair. And you can see why they call it crabs as well, because it's definitely got a crab-like structure to it. It's brilliant. They're dying out. We don't really know why. It could be deforestation, but we don't know. Coming up, the museum welcomes a new dinosaur to its collection. I'm super excited to get this beautiful dinosaur. It's just going to be spectacular. And a new discovery about hope. I've just taken a look at the results and processed what's come back. I'm incredibly excited by this. The Natural History Museum covers an area the size of 200 tennis courts and has five cafes, three shops and 28 different galleries. Making sure this huge museum is ready for the public is a mammoth task, and it's all down to duty manager Jack Evans. Eva, can I grab the sales radius? Have a good day. See you in a bit. He has just 45 minutes to get everything ready before the museum opens for the day. Museum's a very glamorous building, but I reassure you that there's not always glamorous sides to the job. Jack manages a team of 65 front-of-house staff who run the 14-acre site. It always gets to this time, and it gets a bit more exciting because the visitors are on their way. At the top of the stairs, always knackered. I think by the end of the day, we're all kind of like this, like, hmm, keeled over. It's such a physical job. My step count would probably be about 23,000 to 25,000 steps a day. I'm like 12 flights of stairs. You've got to be quite athletic, which I'm not. Hello, control, duty manager over. Just checking in with housekeeping to see if the building's clean enough for us to open. I'm not getting a response. This is the duty manager calling any available housekeeping supervisor or manager, over. It's kind of a bit rude if they don't answer. Hi there, just to double-check that the museum is squeaky clean and ready for our visitors, over. Hello, control, are we ready to open the museum on time? Thank you, out. We are indeed. Time is ticking for the museum's major upcoming exhibition, Fantastic Beasts, the Wonder of Nature. Head of conservation Lorraine Cornish and her team have to prepare over 100 items, including the replica skeleton of a recently discovered dinosaur, Dracorex hogwartsia. The original is in America, where it was discovered in 2004 and is named after Harry Potter's school. I'm super excited to get this beautiful dinosaur. It's going to be the centrepiece of our exhibition with the most amazing name, Dracorex hogwartsia, dragon king of the Hogwarts. It's just going to be spectacular. You've got wizarding world and magic and you've got a dinosaur. What else do you need to start your exhibition? The complex skeleton has arrived in pieces without a manual and needs assembling. So Lorraine has called in dinosaur expert Susie Maidment. As a dinosaur researcher, what part of the dinosaur are you interested in? Most dinosaur experts like skulls, to be honest with you, because skulls can tell us a lot about feeding and things like that. They're a bit more personal, aren't they? They are a bit more personal. Well, you know, we do have... Have we got the skull? ..the replica skull here. Do you want that? Yeah, I've got it on here with all the other bits here, so... Can I pick it up? Yeah, yeah. It's in really good condition and it's really robust. Oh, it's light. Yeah, and it's really light. But don't you think that looks just like a dragon? It just looks exactly like... What, you imagine a dragon? I know, I know, I know. But Lorraine has discovered a problem with the replica skeleton. What's happened here, though? Well, I was hoping we could put it together today so that we could show you, but unfortunately it's travelled across from the US and so some of the pieces were damaged. The one thing a conservator fears is undoing that crate and something is broken. And in this case, we found pieces of the dinosaur lying at the bottom and so there's a sort of intake of breath and, like, OK, let's have a look and see how much damage we've got. And so we've got ribs completely broken off, whole pieces broken off entirely. I've got some more pieces over on the table. So we will be able to repair it, but we'll take four or five days, which we hadn't planned for. We've got to somehow find the time to now repair this beautiful dinosaur so that we can install it. Richard Sabin has been looking after the museum's whales for three decades. But his love of the Natural History Museum stretches back to childhood. I first remember walking into this hall and seeing this blue whale model as a ten-year-old. It was the first time I'd ever been to London, the first time I'd been to the Natural History Museum, and this was the thing that really blew me away. Standing in front of this model makes me remember how excited I was when I first saw this. One of the things that I really wanted to do when I was ten years old on that first visit was take a look at the model close up. And, of course, now that I work for the museum, that's exactly what I can do. Nobody else, just me. Richard's childhood visits would spark his lifelong love of whales. As a ten-year-old, I was all about bones. I wanted to know about skeletons, and seeing the skeleton of the largest animal that's ever lived on the planet was just the most incredible thing. I had to know more. I had no idea that I'd end up working with Hope so closely and in so much detail. And she's really become the pinnacle of my career so far. Who knew? Who knew that was going to happen? That could never be predicted. After months of research, Richard has made a breakthrough in his investigation into Hope. He's been able to trace where Hope travelled during her life. But then the trail goes cold. It appears that in the last years of her life, she suddenly stopped migrating. Richard has an idea of why this was, and he's just received an extraordinary set of results that confirm his suspicions. I've just taken a look at the results and processed what's come back, and what we can see very clearly, very, very clearly, and I'm incredibly excited by this, is that we have evidence that Hope had been pregnant full term. These results show that Hope was pregnant during the last years of her life. With this new information, Richard can now pinpoint exactly when she gave birth. The graph that I've got here is the data that's come back from the analysis, and smack in the middle of the graph is this huge spike in progesterone, the pregnancy hormone. So we have a birth date for Hope's calf of February 1890, based on these data. This is really quite remarkable. And the really wonderful thing for me is that if her calf lived its full lifespan, that means it would have been swimming around in our waters around about 1970 or so. If that calf, in turn, had had offspring, maybe, maybe, just maybe, maybe Hope's grandchildren are swimming around, still in the ocean today, following that same migration route. Records show that a year later she became stranded and died on a sandbank as she journeyed past Wexford Harbour on the Irish coast. Richard still has an important question that needs answering. So one of the mysteries, which is still pretty much an open question, is why Hope died, why she beached in Wexford Harbour. I really need to do a bit more thinking about what I still believe to be the last open question, which is why did she beach? How did she manage to strand such a powerful animal? Maybe these data can give me a little bit of insight. Coming up, the museum's new dinosaur refuses to take shape. This is like a giant Meccano set that's full of very fragile pieces that you're trying to put together. And Hope's last secret. There's a mystery still to be addressed, and it's the final mystery. The deadline is looming for the Natural History Museum's upcoming exhibition. With a broken replica dinosaur on her hands, Head of Conservation Lorraine Cornish is having to work round the clock to assemble its complex skeleton. The clock is ticking and we have a schedule planned, and now this is an additional piece of work that we've got to do, so any bits of spare time that we thought we had, we don't have any more, and we're doing this. This whole ribcage section here had actually broken along quite a few of those lines, so what I'm doing is just that bit of in-painting so that you cannot see where that break happened. This has taken up quite a lot of time, and I'm going to nickname it a little bit of a diva dinosaur, to be honest, in terms of the attention it's demanding from us. But, you know, it's worth it, absolutely worth it. With the repairs complete, Lorraine can finally try to assemble the Dracorex skeleton. This is like a giant Meccano set that's full of very fragile pieces that you're trying to put together, so you're literally building a dinosaur. It's getting longer. Yeah, it's nice and long now, isn't it? You feel like you're gradually bringing it to life as you put each piece on. It's just like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, but quite a challenging one. Jigsaw puzzles usually behave a little bit better than this dinosaur is. Dino expert Susie Maidment is joining Lorraine for its crowning moment. Hi, Lorraine. Hi, Susie, how are you? This looks good. This looks much better than last time I saw it. It looks so much better, isn't it? You've just caught me pinning the tail on the dinosaur, literally. This is the last bit of tail, so I've got you down here because there's one more piece to put on, Susie. The skull. So can I do the honours, Lorraine? You can, Susie. I've saved the best for last for you. How exciting. It's all quite simple. That's it, then put him up a little bit more, so he's looking... Yes, exactly. There we go. Yeah. There he goes. Right, we let him go? Yeah. Look at that. Hey. There he is. There he is. Look at that. Oh, handsome. This specimen looks fantastic. I can't believe how different it looks from when I saw it. I think it's going to be the star of the show, as it should be as a dinosaur. So you've got Harry Potter, Wizarding World, dinosaurs, dragons. The whole mix is there, isn't it? The public are going to absolutely love this specimen. It's been a busy day for duty manager Jack Evans and his team, who are just getting ready to close up. Attention, all front-of-house radio holders, this is the duty manager. The museum is now closed to the public. Please, can you start clearing the galleries wherever you are? Thank you. Gearing up now for closing. I'm just going to sweep the galleries to make sure that there's no-one hiding in the kind of strange hiding places in here. You never know what you might find. It's kind of nice, actually, to walk through when there's no-one here. Even though it's a bit creepy in some areas. It's nice, you can kind of have some, like, one-to-one time with a donkey. This is probably a good spot to edge people onto the doors. We obviously don't want to force people out the doors, but we've kind of got this gentle lean-in and kind of graciously nudge. Richard Sabin's 18-month investigation into Hope the Whale's life story is coming to an end. He's plotted her route across the globe and discovered that in the last years of her life she gave birth to a calf. But there's one question that still needs answering. What caused this giant blue whale to beach on a sandbank in Wexford Harbour on the Irish coast? There's a mystery still to be addressed, and it's the final mystery. It's the mystery of why she died, how she died, what were the circumstances? Richard has finally pieced together the story of Hope's last hours. It's my feeling that it's probably down to two main factors, the first one being she would have been weakened by the pregnancy and by feeding that calf for all those months, investing all her energy in keeping her calf alive. There's another factor. We know from records that in the days before she appeared on the south-east coast of Ireland, there were terrible storms in the area, and I have a dreadful feeling that Hope may have been caught by those storms, that she may have been pulled into the incredibly tidal waters of Wexford Harbour, into the shallows, and didn't have the strength to break free, had no way to get herself out of that predicament. Hope died on the morning of 25th March 1891, and remarkably, Richard has uncovered a photograph in an Irish museum that matches the exact date and location of where Hope was found. It shows the blue whale in her final moments. I've got a photograph here that shows Hope lying on a sandbank in shallow water. She's on her right-hand side with four men standing on top of her body, and she's been released, we believe, from her misery by one of the men who made her a harpoon, a homemade harpoon, and plunged it into her body to release her. It really does have quite an impact, and, you know, just... It does bring her to life, really, to have this information. Ultimately, when I stop and think about it, it's quite overpowering, it's quite overwhelming. Richard has solved the 130-year-old mystery about Hope, and soon everyone who comes to the museum can discover more about her story. Even though this is an incredibly sad story, there is a silver lining to all this. People will get to know this story, and I really think it will surprise and inspire them. We've created an incredibly powerful message of hope, and Hope's story is an example of what the Natural History Museum is all about, using our collections to inspire people through science to look after, protect and conserve the natural world. Next time... ..a new dinosaur discovery... It slightly blows your mind, doesn't it? ..gruesome secrets from our prehistoric ancestors... So these teeth marks must be from a human. This is definitely cannibalistic behaviour. ..and the most famous dinosaur of all time. Dippy mania has taken over.