It has giddying cliffs, three-billion-year-old rocks, a prehistoric forest – and a giant bronze dinosaur called Fern. Our writer hurtles back through millennia as the beloved museum’s five-year revamp comes to fruition
Queueing for three billion years might sound like an ordeal, but the Natural History Museum has made it a thrill. When the daily stampede of visitors in their thousands now exits the pedestrian tunnel connecting South Kensington station to the grand London institution, they will embark on a journey of several aeons.
“We want to get people to walk through geological time,” says Dr Paul Kenrick, lead scientist for the museum’s new evolution garden. He is standing at the tunnel exit, where two cliff faces of rock sheer up on either side of a ramp, forming a rugged canyon of stacked strata. It looks like the result of a violent tectonic rupture: the rocky walls shoot forcefully outwards, as if fissured from the depths of the Earth, framing views of a prehistoric forest of ferns beyond.
The journey begins with Lewisian gneiss, the oldest, hardest rock in the country. Formed around three billion years ago, it was hauled here from the Outer Hebrides, where the blocks had been lying as leftovers from building a causeway. Next come hefty slabs of pink Torridonian sandstone, then greenish Cambrian quartzite and purple Welsh heather slate, as visitors progress up through the sloping gulley of geological history. “You travel five million years every metre,” adds Kenrick. “Although, to be true to scale, the Precambrian period should start half a mile down the road.”
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