Natural History Museum

So staying in South Kensington is a great idea, actually.

It's a great place for families because you're close to the park, you're close to some of the really, you've got the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the V&A, which is where I would stay in South Kensington, just to be opposite the V&A.

But yeah, you see, you've got a fantastic choice there and really good access to public transport as well, which is really...

And as you say, like being able to go to get, you know, Sainsbury's or Sainsbury's Express or go to Marks and Spencer's food to get, there's plenty of opportunities to go and get different things that you can bring back if you're self-catering.

Having been to

the British Natural History Museum in England, that shit is filled with this shit.

Everywhere.

Yeah.

The earliest account of an antlered doe that I found in the literature, and it's got to be one of the earliest because the year was 1607.

In the British Museum of Natural History, there's a small antler and it's labeled 1607.

And it has some, with the old English words of the day, it has something about this antler grew on the frontlet of a female.

And it says some other thing, the frontlet.

I'm one of those folks that never lost their dinosaur face growing up.

So, yes, I was, as a young child, I was visiting the Natural History Museum in London, like Exactly as you said, standing underneath an amazing skeleton that was there.

It was a cast, but it was still an amazing skeleton called Dippy, which was a long-necked dinosaur.

But also I was lucky enough, I was brought by my mother down to what we call the Jurassic Coast, which is the south coast of the UK, where you can find many small fossils of small marine animals in the rocks along the beaches there.

And it won the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award.

This particular award was run by the Natural History Museum in London.

So there's a little bit more gravitas than the other two and a half million people.

uh photography awards that are there you know you can win an award for absolutely anything but you know the natural history museum in london is clearly world-renowned institution so it has a little bit of weight to it and it's um the photographer is actually well let's talk about the picture first of all because it's it's quite an interesting picture and it it's processed quite heavily and clearly i'm presuming we'll pop a uh uh listing into the notes below so But it's quite a simple picture, really.

The composition's not particularly clever.

The processing is a touch overdone.

Each print showing four distinct toes played in a pattern, consistent with a heavy reptilian creature.

Wetherill made plaster casts of the prints and sent them to the Natural History Museum in London for expert analysis, announcing to the Daily Mail that he had found definitive physical evidence of the creature's existence.

The Natural History Museum took several weeks to complete their analysis.

When they delivered their verdict, it was devastating.

The footprints had been made by a single hippopotamus foot, dried, preserved, and almost certainly of the type commonly sold as novelty items and used as umbrella stands in British homes of the period.

Someone had pressed the same foot into the mud repeatedly, rotating it slightly, each time to create the impression of a four-footed creature walking along the shore.

The Natural History Museum's experts were unambiguous.

Every single print had been made by the same individual hippopotamus foot.

Well, it's like what

they say, you know, do you know why the pyramids are in Egypt? Because they won't fit in the British Museum of Natural History.

Oh, gosh.

There it is.