December 20 , 2016:

by Fiona Harvey

Dippy the diplodocus, star of the Natural History Museum since 1905, host of dinner parties and films, terrifier of small children, is leaving his post as guardian of the huge entrance hall and embarking on Britain’s first dinosaur tour.

As well as museums, the colossal skeleton will be shown in a community centre, the Welsh devolved assembly, and a cathedral. Eight venues have been chosen in all, including those in Belfast to Birmingham, Glasgow and Dorset. All will be free to the public.

One of the most unusual will be Norwich Cathedral, a juxtaposition of evolution and religion that might have amused Darwin, and still might fans of Richard Dawkins. The 900-year-old church was built to inspire humanity by its size and magnificence, a feat the dinosaur managed when it was unearthed in 1898, four decades after the Origin of Species.

In Rochdale, the venue will be more down-to-earth, in the form of a community centre which the museum describes as a “destination for day-to-day life, rather than culture”, housing social services, council offices and a library. Councillors are braving the inevitable comparisons with the dinosaur.

The plans for Dippy’s planned removal provoked outrage in some quarters and the Twitter hashtag #savedippy when first announced early last year, but the museum is now confident that the tour will prove popular.

“We wanted Dippy to visit unusual locations so he can draw in people who may not traditionally visit a museum. Making iconic items accessible to as many people as possible is at the heart of what museums give to the nation,” said Sir Michael Dixon, director of the Natural History Museum.

Children in particular are likely to be drawn to the 21-metre-long, 4.25-metre-high skeleton, said Philippa Charles, director of the Garfield Weston Foundation, which is financing the tour. “Generations of children have been awestruck by Dippy’s spectacular presence, and we hope he continues to inspire the nation to rediscover nature as he works his way round the UK.”

Curators hope the dinosaur’s replacement, the skeleton of a blue whale, will become no less iconic. Blue whales, the largest mammals on the planet, are listed as endangered, with fewer than 15,000 estimated to be in our oceans today, compared with more than 240,000 likely to have been living before they were hunted to the brink of extinction for their oil, meat and bones.

The switch from a dinosaur to a whale is also symbolic of the evolving role of museums from treasure-houses of historic relics to places to help conserve the present as well as the past, encouraging visitors to explore the living world around them.

Curators are hoping that their blue whale, which will be accompanied by interactive exhibits highlighting its evolution, natural habitats and current plight, will serve to represent both human responsibility for pushing a species to the brink of extinction and our continuing responsibility for its protection and recovery. The museum now wants to emphasise the “natural” now as much as “history”.

The whale, a female which has been on display elsewhere in the museum since soon after it was beached in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1891, is as yet unnamed. No decision has been taken on whether to have a public competition or whether a name will naturally develop among visitors, as happened with Dippy. The prospect of Whaley McWhaleface may encourage the latter.

While the whale skeleton is genuine, few visitors are aware that Dippy is essentially a fake - a plaster-cast copy that is actually a composite of several diplodocuses. It was inspired by the discovery of an astonishingly near-complete original in Wyoming in 1899 by workers building a new railway, and billed by newspapers at the time as “the most colossal animal ever on earth”. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born billionaire, acquired the bones for his museum in Pittsburg, and when scientists discovered it was a previously unknown species of diplodocus it was named after him: Diplodocus carnegii.

During the second world war, Dippy was dismantled and kept in boxes in the vaults under the museum, to keep it safe from bombs.

Dippy would originally have lived about 150m years ago, in the late Jurassic period. Diplodocus, of which several species are known, ate only plants and grew to 30 metres long and weighed 15 tonnes, making them some of the largest creatures ever to have walked the earth. They walked on four legs with a long neck and a longer tail with 80 vertebrae, that could be flicked like a whip.

Even when Dippy departs, the Natural History Museum will still boast halls full of dinosaur bones, fossils, eggs and models - including the first Tyrannosaurus rex ever to be discovered - a Triceratops skull and an Iguanodon, one of the first species to be described as a dinosaur. Judging by the reactions of some of the youngest visitors recently, these will continue to be the biggest draw, both as exhibitions and in the gift shop.

The last day on show in London for Dippy will be 4 January, following a month of special events celebrating dinosaurs, after which the museum’s conservators will spend a year preparing the cast for the journey.

Dippy will be on show from 2018 on a tour taking nearly three years, starting in the Dorset County Museum on the Jurassic Coast, and taking in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Birmingham Museum, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the Great North Museum in Newcastle, the National Assembly of Wales, Number One Riverside Rochdale, and ending up in Norwich Cathedral.