Annual Review 2022-23

More than a million people welcomed home the nation’s favourite dinosaur this year following a whirlwind tour of the UK beginning in 2017. Supported by the Garfield Weston Foundation, the tour reportedly saw a ‘Dippy effect’ wherever it went, with a record-breaking two million visitors and just under £36 million of economic benefit across the eight locations. Now Dippy has moved on once more to a new home in Coventry on a three-year loan.

In March 2023, a life-sized cast of Patagotitan mayorum went on display in South Kensington. It’s the first time this gentle giant has set foot in Europe. At four times heavier than Dippy the Diplodocus and 12 metres longer than Hope the blue whale, it’s a truly spectacular sight.

At our exhibition Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur, visitors come face-to-face with this giant and learn how a creature of this colossal size could have survived and thrived on Earth. The exhibition also highlights the need to care for the planet's largest and most vulnerable creatures today.

The fifty-eighth edition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year opened with a fresh new look. The WPY Horizons initiative is helping to diversify entrants, so as to better showcase the talents of photographers from the global south, as well as women and nonbinary photographers.

We also partnered with Young Minds for a Compassionate World to provide training to a group of young aspiring photographers from India. Through this work, we hope to inspire a new generation of photographers who will tell locally rooted stories of our planet with empathy and creativity.

Professor Anjali Goswami and her team at the Museum created a new model of mammal evolution by studying a collection of skulls. They used 3D scans of 322 specimens to shed light on theevolution of mammals in the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs and how it has influenced life on Earth today. 

The research was only made possible because new techniques enable us to analyse specimens that have been in our collections for hundreds of years. The new data it has provided could help predict how species will respond to rapid changes in their environment.

These methods could be truly transformative for the future of natural history research, as they offer new ways to understand evolution and extinction. There’s also scope to see how we can use this knowledge to tackle the planetary emergency on a global scale.

Alongside physical changes, we can also gain valuable insights into the history - and the future - of insects by looking at their genes. Extracting the genetic code from the remains of long dead animals was once the stuff of science fiction. Today, it’s not only possible, but we can even use fragments of DNA preserved in sediment layers to build a picture of whole ancient ecosystems.

Compared to larger animals, studying smaller creatures such as insects presents unique challenges, but could unlock new ways for researchers to use the extensive insect specimens held in museum collections.

Despite the challenges, our researcher Dr Selina Brace and colleagues were able to successfully extract the genomes of bumblebees from different museum collections. The study, published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution, sheds light on how DNA degrades over time and how it can be reconstructed to gain insights into the past.

'This study is one of the first to look at the DNA of a large number of insect specimens across different museums,' Selina explains. 'It’s really important to have been able to understand how that DNA is preserved.'

With this vast resource at their fingertips, our researchers could build a detailed picture of how past environmental shifts have impacted insect populations over thousands of years and through this better predict their responses to current and future threats.

Along with the UK’s Department for Education, the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Society, we are creating a National Education Nature Park and awards scheme for every school in England. The goal is to inspire young people to connect with nature, understand biodiversity and climate resilience and feel confident to take action. 

The scheme will help students turn the green spaces at their schools into their own nature parks, creating a network of educational outdoor areas managed by the students themselves. They will be able to gain valuable knowledge and leadership skills while contributing to biodiversity and climate resilience in their local communities.

Our Explorers Programme is encouraging more young people from marginalised backgrounds in the UK to study science subjects and pursue careers in museums and natural history, specifically in Earth, Environmental and Ecological Sciences. 

Our first Explorers Conference was an opportunity for attendees to learn about career opportunities first hand from successful scientists from similar backgrounds, participate in workshops and network with speakers and peers. 

Volunteers are vital to our work, with more than 500 currently generously donating their time to engage with our visitors and support our scientists and collections. We offer a range of exciting volunteer, internship and work experience opportunities, all designed to benefit participants as much as they benefit us. Each one, whether it’s public facing or behind the scenes, provides enriching and inspiring experiences for both our volunteers and our visitors.

We recently contributed to a ground-breaking paper in Science, which highlights the unparalleled insight into life on Earth that collections like ours can provide. Despite this much of the information contained within them is currently inaccessible. 

The paper proposes a database to access natural history collections around the world and emphasises the leading role that natural history museums can play. This could enable more strategic and equitable use of collections, especially in the fight against climate change. 

So far we have digitised more than 5.5 million specimens - an astonishing number, and yet only about 7% of the total collection. This new paper reinforces our goal to speed up our digitisation programme and make vital natural history data widely accessible around the world.

We partnered with Universal to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the iconic film Jurassic Park, which spawned a generation of dinosaur lovers. To celebrate, we co-created a nostalgic Jurassic Park pop-up shop, offering a range of merchandise and decorated with life-size animatronic models to inspire the next wave of dino enthusiasts.