Richard Fallon, PhD
Researcher at the University of Leicester and Centre for Arts and Humanities
Research, Natural History Museum, London.
I spend a lot of my time trying to
recapture the ways in which Britons around the turn of the century learnt about
prehistoric animals, in particular dinosaurs, and so it’s very useful to know
what visitors back then were actually looking at in their museums. Luckily,
visitors to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in South Kensington, which opened
in 1881, were able to purchase guidebooks that show us the exact layout of the old
galleries.
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As a Victorian, you would have seen nothing like this.
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Anyone who’s been to the NHM lately
might reasonably expect that Victorians and Edwardians turned left at the entrance
and entered the big west Dino Gallery, just as we do today. But if you had done
that back then, you’d have actually entered one of the world’s largest collections
of stuffed birds. In fact, the entire west side of the building was dedicated
to modern skeletons and taxidermy.
How about the east gallery? Now it’s the
gift-shop, but back then it was actually the Gallery of Fossil Mammalia, lined
all the way down with austere cabinets and with a proud central row of the
Museum’s most complete mounted fossils: the famous Mastodon, a mammoth skull,
the Irish deer—just to name the most prominent items. The shady pavilion at the
far end brought visitors to South America, whose iconic Megatherium loomed menacingly over them. Around the edges of the
pavilion lurked the fossil birds, such as the various moas and the priceless Archæopteryx macrura.
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The sensational femur of Atlantosaurus.
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You’ve probably deduced by now
that dinosaurs were far from the main
attraction of the Museum in 1881, or 1891 and 1901, for that matter. Their home
was the eastern Gallery of Fossil Reptilia, a bit of a corridor and one of the
few areas of the museum that has changed very little since 1881. The walls were
still lined with those prize saurians, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, but the various
fragments of dinosaur that were on
display were hardly complete enough to articulate and mount. Instead, they languished
in cabinets and waist-high table-cases. The impressively massive thigh-bone of
the American Atlantosaurus, of which
a cast arrived a few years after the Museum’s opening, constituted one of the very best relics on show.
As one commentator observed,
visitors often ‘pass hastily by the cases of bones, teeth, and skeletons’,
preferring instead
‘the more attractive collection of stuffed birds on the other side’. How times
have changed.
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Composite photo of the worldly remains of Cetiosaurus leedsi
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In the subsequent decades, the dusty
cases of the Gallery of Fossil Reptilia were swept to the walls and the
corridor was gradually filled with more striking mounted, suspended, and articulated
fossils of the sort museumgoers expect today. It was still a slow process. You
have to feel a little sorry for Cetiosaurus
leedsi, the dilapidated but very British dinosaur that arrived in 1903,
only to be outshone by the world-famous cast of Diplodocus carnegii that was placed in the Museum two years later.
The Diplodocus was so big that it had
to be placed in the west side, with the modern reptiles, and it was quickly joined
by casts of Triceratops and a
relocated Iguanodon. The age of the
dinosaur museum was beginning.
The Natural History Museum’s
original collections are so scattered that you can quite easily come across
something unexpected when wandering around there today. The cautious and
systematic Victorian arrangement has been thoroughly jumbled, but it’s still
interesting to think about the ghost of the old plan as you look around. I’ll
tell you one thing, though: there are a heck of a lot fewer stuffed birds on
show there today.
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