HARRIET WADHAM REPORTING: FRIGHT AT THE MUSEUM-OH WAIT; THAT’S JUST DAD

Donning the guise of the hardbitten newshound so familiar from a dozen 1950s movies (we are even looking into getting her a trilby hat with a card saying "Press") she will boldly go where no other girl reporters dare tread....


The first time I walked into the Natural History Museum (this was with my class on a residential trip to London) I was expecting it to be like those `Night at the Museum` films. I then corrected myself when I remembered they were set in America.

The great big dinosaur skeleton loomed above my head as I walked in. I wonder if you knew that he’s called Dippy? Or that the very end of his tail is the width of a grown man’s little finger?

Probably. Probably not. Here there’s a picture of a pliosaur skeleton just for an example of how enormous the prehistoric reptiles were. Compare it with the boy on the left called Henry who (unfortunately) is my brother. Once you think about it, it’s enormous!












Or how about the colossal bugs there were due to the uneven oxygen levels! This is a model, not a fossil.

Of course, that’s not the main subject of my report. Cryptozoological items are! When we were looking in the room with all the crystals and precious metals in, Mum saw this block of amber with an animal trapped inside it. Aside from the amber itself, the animal is at the very least a million years old. Most likely it ended up getting stuck in an open wound in the tree which over time enveloped it.

I will give you this though: I wasn’t too comfortable with the Human Biology bit so I made a quick escape by looking at my feet and keeping my hands either side of my eyes. Peripheral vision, curse you. However, there was something else there that sincerely cheesed me off. BAD GRAMMAR!!! (trust me to point that one out.) On one of the notices it read fishes. FISH, not fishes! Also the people who make the information notices seem to think hippopotamuses is a word. HIPPOPOTAMI.
I have also recently discovered that echidnas look a bit silly (in my opinion).

But the duck-billed platypus is a really clever part of evolution. I mean, who thought up a semi aquatic mammal that lays eggs? I have a picture of each of them here which you may or may not laugh out loud at. I don’t mind which because I can’t hear you.

In the Creepy Crawlies section I saw (and loved) some iridescent bugs.

What makes them shine so much is the ultra-violet light from the sun reflecting off of the wings or shell of the bug, consequently activating chemicals that make the bug shine.

Moreover, I met the most complete primate fossil ever! She’s called Ida but unfortunately I can’t seem to recall the age.

In one of the adjoining corridors at the Natural History Museum there is a giant ground sloth skeleton. They lived in the scrub and grasslands of South America until 10,000 years ago- the extinction was supposedly down to the arrival of humans. Compare it to me- it’s really big! I wouldn’t have liked to be stepped on by that.

Sabre-toothed cats are also a favourite of mine. Their habitat was North America until their extinction 15,000 years ago. They had the same dimensions as a modern-day lion. They ambushed their prey and ate it by digging their long fangs into the flesh; but they also scavenged on the dead and dying animals.

And now, just because it has the name of my favourite Marvel character, the Wolverine (yay!).

Its Latin name is Gulo gulo and in winter it feeds off of reindeer. Rudolph is spared.

Come summertime it will hunt a wider variety of food like birds and smaller mammals; if it comes across the remains of animals killed earlier then it will feed off of that. The young are born in a den in early spring with a litter of up to four babies.

This is the Wolverine and although it may not look menacing, it is ferocious. To its prey, anyway.

SEA COWS!! They have baffled humans for centuries (until modern times); giving sailors the delusions that there were pulchritudinous sirens among the waves, wailing their songs of seduction.

Of course, the likely explanation is that they saw a sea cow’s tail and mistook it for a mermaid’s. About the singing... well, either the sailor was drunk or they heard the wind, because grunts, clicks and whistles don’t really sound like Santa Lucia to me.

Here is a picture of what the sailors used to call the ‘siren of the seas’. The black block is covering something that I’m not too comfortable with (although it’s only a picture, I’m still unhappy about it).

And last but not least, the Narwhal. These are the only whales to have tusks. The male narwhals fight with them to take possesion of a female during the mating season and the thick layers of blubber help to keep the narwhal warm in the cold seas. Their natural predators are the killer whales and polar bears. This is a picture of a narwhal skull; this narwhal has two tusks so if it were a male it would have an advantage in a fight. If it were still alive; anyhow.

So that was my first report for the CFZ. I say report, not blog. Anyway, another few things I was thinking as I walked through the doors of the museum for the second time were ‘What’s going to be in this report of mine? How am I going to start and end it? What type of humour am I going to put in it? Most importantly, will my readers love it and how are they going to respond?’ (OK, maybe that wasn’t word for word). Well, you’ve just read the answers to the first three questions, but it’s up to you to decide the answer to the last. Credits to my sister Lily for taking the wonderful pictures for the report so that the readers could see what I was babbling on about!