Audio guide transcript for the Evolution Garden
Open each of the boxes to read the transcribed audio tour.
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Introduction stop
NARRATOR
Welcome to the Natural History Museum gardens. Today, you’ll hear how life on earth has evolved and changed over vast periods of time; how nature is still everywhere, connected in a complex and delicate web of life; how we as humans fit into that story, and what we can do to protect the future of our planet.
My name’s Alice, and I’ll be your guide today!
On this audioguide, we’ll offer you a route through the gardens starting with the Evolution Garden, before moving onto the Nature Discovery Garden on the other side of the museum. The guide includes navigation guidance, moments of audio description, interviews with scientists and other experts, as well as poetry specially co-created with blind and visually-impaired young people.
The first garden we’re going to explore on this tour is the Evolution Garden, which stretches across the front eastern side of the museum. As we move through the garden together, you’ll experience the epic story of how our planet has changed over billions of years. Starting with the emergence of the first life forms on Earth, moving through the age of the dinosaurs, and eventually arriving in the present day, this tour takes you on a journey through time.
While there are different paths you can take through the garden, our tour follows a prescribed route. If you listen to the tracks in order, navigation tracks will lead you to each stop on the route. Feel free to pause the tracks at any point if you need more time. If you listen to all the tracks in order it will take around 60 minutes. Just to note, there is a café with toilets in the Evolution Garden. The first entrance into the Museum building is at the end of the Evolution Garden and up a ramp, which will take you to the central hall.
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Welcome’, and is read by the whole group of participants and poet Testament.
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Introduction stop A
It’s a very specific smell
Early in the morning
When the air is fresh
The taste of the city
Witness a story of change
A story that could only be told by nature
The crowd listening in the garden
A golden diplodocus bends it’s neck to hear
Let the children discover
Sense out this hidden habitat
Something to smell,
A moment for tactile learning
Buttercups and moss
Respite from the concrete
Sanctuary for the animals
The human family tree and its future
Though sometimes roots pull us apart
We must hope that the life we shed
Grows into new trees that speak
To those now,
I, myself, and nature
Energising, invigorating, awake
Lost hours ...found
Welcome
NARRATOR
In the next track, some of our team will properly introduce you to the Evolution Garden.
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Stop 1
NARRATOR
Welcome to the Evolution Garden! We’re starting this tour in the top corner of the garden, having entered through the entrance on Exhibition Road. From here, we’re overlooking the garden that stretches ahead of us and down to the right. We recommend moving slightly forward along the wide, sloping path to listen to this track. Paul Kenrick, a Principal Researcher here at the Natural History Museum, tells us more about this garden.
PAUL KENRICK
The Evolution Garden is about giving our visitors an understanding of the length of geological time and also the scale of change that has gone on in the past. So, what we're doing is we're asking our visitors to walk through the Phanerozoic Eon, which is like the last 540 million years of Earth history. And we're scaling the various geological periods to that.
At the end of their journey, we show them the length of human evolution and they can then get some context in terms of how long humans have been on earth and the length of geological time they've walked through. It's an immersive journey, so what we're doing as they're walking through the garden, we're pulling off interesting things to tell them stories about change that has happened through time in an immersive way. So, the journey is 540 million years in 15 minutes!
NARRATOR
That's a lot of history in one garden! Paul tells us a little bit more about what we can expect.
PAUL KENRICK
Our journey through the garden, we're evoking a sense of change and understanding of the vast changes that have happened through geological time. And to do this, we're using three main elements. We're using the geological wall, which takes us through the geological developments of Great Britain, principally. We're using planting to evoke a sense of change, to tell its own story of botanical evolution. And we're using a series of inlays and sculptures to help us with our narrative, to focus on particular stories and things. So, it's those three things that are really important. They're telling us different things, interesting things about how Great Britain has formed.
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Who comes to the museum to see a rock?’, and is read by Anna, one of the young people.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the following track.
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Stop 1a
The Silence has Spoken.
What we stand on
Is digging into the soles of your shoes
With the brutal honesty of heavy metal
Hewn from rough cliff faces, dug from a quarry
Make your weapons, put on your armour
Display or decoration, it wants to go home
Take your garnets
Make your palaces “lah-de-dah”
In your hands it’s a trophy
Tap once, it has a lot to say
Deep sound answers you
The sky darkens
‘Put me down’
Beneath you is a secret panorama
Curving and dense, irregular and uneven
Hollow stones, slices of pain piled up
Scraping your cheek to understand its origins
Gravity upon gravity, you can almost feel the raindrops
Running your fingers along different patterns
An object of beauty, ignored
You just watch me like a watch
Time lays upon time, rocks within rocks
Made from the violence of the everyday
Deep pressures cause memories to fuse within its body
Gradually crumbling beneath your feet
Tap twice, I have a lot to say
Deep sound answers you
Hold me on the right side
We are one
We cannot be separated.
Made to survive
You will breathe even if you think that your breath has run out.
When the sky looks uncertain
I’m here and will comfort you.
Tap one more time
Deep sound answers
I miss you.
For directions to the next stop, listen to the next track.
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Stop 1b
NARRATOR
Facing into the garden with the Exhibition Road entrance behind you, you can probably hear the traffic of the busy Cromwell Road to your left. Our first stop is the two large geological stone walls directly below us to the right. To get there, we’re going to move down into the garden. The path in front of us is very wide, slopes downwards, and is edged on either side with channels of large gravel pieces.
Follow the path, which - like all the paths in this garden – is made from very smooth stone, all the way down to the end. Here, it curves to the right around a large London Plane tree behind low metal railings. Follow the path around to the right, and continue moving a little further forward.
You’re now heading towards the entrance to the Transport For London pedestrian tunnel. Soon, you’ll find yourself flanked on both sides by very tall walls made up from different kinds of stone. Feel free to reach out and feel the different textures and surfaces of them. The rocks are arranged in thick diagonal bands, and each has different colours, patterns, and markings.
To hear more about these walls, listen to the next track.
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Stop 2
NARRATOR
Paul Kenrick, a Principal Researcher, was one of the key people involved in planning the impressive rocky walls that line both sides of the walkway up into the Gardens from the Transport for London tunnel. The rocks used start with some of the oldest in the UK, at more than 2.7 billion years old, and progressively become more recent. Paul tells us more about the rocks used, their properties, and what they can tell us about geological evolution.
PAUL KENRICK
So, it's about coming through and understanding that the Earth is a dynamic structure. So, we think of geology as hard, you know, rocks are hard things, we know that. But, in fact, over very long periods of time, they are sort of dynamic. They fold, they bend, they twist. And you'll get some sense of that walking from the Transport for London Tunnel out into the garden, some sense of the massive quality of the pieces, of the folding nature of them, of the way that they abut and join towards each other in a sort of slanted pattern.
And also the change in the colour and texture of the rocks as you go through. So, as we come through that sequence, that's probably the most colourful sequence of rock that we've got. So, you've got the pink and grey banding of the rocks of the gneiss, you've got the whites, very stark whites of the anorthosite. Then you come into a sort of orangey-red Torridonian sandstone, then into the thing called the greenschist, which green in colour. And then you come through into the Cambrian sequence where we've got a white quartzite, also from Scotland, which is a very hard metamorphic rock, but it's a lovely white colour.
And then we come into a slate from Wales and the slate is a purply, purply-blue colour, and it's quite a different texture to the rocks that it's abutting. So, you'll be able to, I think, feel that actually as you go through. There is a difference in the texture of those rocks as you come up into the garden, particularly, I think you'll notice the hardness of the Lewisian gneiss. And the different sort of slatey cleavage of the Cambrian slate from Wales, which is quite distinctive.
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘You are Touching the Oldest Rock in Britain’, and is read by Vicky, an access specialist.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the following track.
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Stop 2a
You are touching the oldest rock in Britain
Yes even older than your grandmother
3000 million years old
Before life got complicated
From deep beneath the earth’s crust
To where the old boulders lay
Rough and dented
Rolling
Bands of colours
Bequeathed to your hand
It is fragile and rare.
Etching marks onto your skin
You are touching the oldest rock in Britain
Become one with it.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the next track.
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Stop 2b
NARRATOR
Turn so that the Transport for London tunnel entrance is behind you, and you’re facing out into the gardens. Move towards the right-hand side of the pathway so that you can follow the large stone Timeline wall here. Move forward a short distance, and soon you’ll feel the wall curve round 90 degrees to the right. Follow it round to the right, and you’ll come to a small rectangular information panel affixed to the wall, as well as several brass tactile objects, all representing some of the earliest life on Earth.This is our next stop. Play the next track to find out more.
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Stop 3
NARRATOR
This display marks a huge shift in Earth’s history. For billions of years, life on earth had been microscopic. However, over 500 million years ago, this changed dramatically. Under the sea, an explosion of new life happened as increased oxygen levels allowed creatures to thrive, becoming larger and more complex.
The brass tactile objects affixed to this wall represent some of these early creatures. As you’re feeling for them, see if you can pick out identifying features that we still recognise from animals today – eyes, limbs, antennae, fins, and protective shells. These seemingly strange creatures were early steps on the evolutionary journey that would lead to the animals we know today.
As these animals evolved, some began hunting others, using their new senses of sight, smell, and feel. Their prey responded in kind, over time evolving to have defensive physical shells and spines, and developing other protective behaviour.
For directions to the next stop, listen to the next track.
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Stop 3a
NARRATOR
To get to our next stop, if you’re still facing the brass tactiles affixed to the timeline wall, turn to your left. You’re now at the bottom of a flight of stone steps. Just to note, to the left of the bottom step there is a free-standing information panel that has a 3D, ridged tactile object that represents a trilobite. This was an underwater relative of the spiders, insects and crabs we know today, that lived in the seas 460 million years ago.
To continue our tour though, we’re going up the steps. These are the only steps you’ll need to take on our tour. There are nine of them in total, they’re quite deep, and there’s a double level wooden banister running up each side.
If you’d rather or cannot not take the steps, you can also reach the next stop by following the wide path by the geological timeline wall. To do this, turn so that the steps are on your right, and follow the right-hand corner of this wide path forwards. After a medium distance, it will turn to the right, and begin to slope upwards. Keep following it round to the right, then move forwards, and you’ll eventually come to the top of those nine steps we mentioned earlier.
You’re now in a roughly circular space, planted with lots of tree ferns and surrounded by lots of seating, including both wooden benches and geological stone ones, which are made from rocks true to the period being represented here. With the steps behind you, move forward slightly and you’ll reach another freestanding information panel.
To hear more about this area of the garden from Head of Gardens Tom McCarter, play the next track.
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Stop 4
TOM MCCARTER
So, the first garden that you kind of arrive at is a section called Moving to Land, and this tells the story of the earliest evolving land plants. So, there are things like mosses and liverworts, which are known as bryophytes. So, the same moss that you get in your garden, lawns, and we're trying to cultivate those and showcase them. And so, we're excluding all the other plants, so things like flowering plants that come later in the evolutionary story, so it's going to be a garden that's very low growing.
NARRATOR
There are some of these low growing mosses and liverworts nearby. With the steps behind us, there’s a low stone bench to our right, and these plants are behind that, dotted around the barren, stoney area between here and the road beyond. You can’t get any closer to this part of the garden, so Tom explains some more.
TOM MCCARTER
It's probably one of the most challenging elements of the garden to represent, because if you're thinking about life on earth, life evolved in the seas. So, the far eastern side of the site should in theory be completely bare and just rocks. So, that's an interesting part of the garden. And then we've got the section where we're going to allow mosses and liverworts and bryophytes to live. And we've got to create the right conditions for them to grow, which could be quite tricky and might not happen very quickly. It might happen over years rather than an instant effect. So, that's the first section you get to when life was kind of still mainly in the seas, but starting to creep out onto land.
NARRATOR
For directions to the next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 4a
NARRATOR
Facing the information panel, we’re going to turn left and start moving forward along the path in front of us. You might still be able to hear the vehicle traffic running along Cromwell road across the garden to our left.
The path we’re on is made up of large, irregular shaped stone slabs. The way they’ve been laid means that there’s a zig-zag type effect where their edges meet the planted part of the garden: the light colour of the stones contrasting with the dark earth they meet. There are benches placed at intervals along each side – again, some wooden, some stone.
A medium way down this pathway, on the left-hand side, you’ll come to a freestanding information panel that has another bronze 3D tactile creature on it.
Select the next track to hear more about it.
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Stop 5
NARRATOR
Reach out and feel the bronze creature to the right of this tactile panel. This is a Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago. Its head is at the top of the panel, and its tail at the bottom. You might be able to feel the scales that run all down its back and tail. You can feel that its head and body were flat, like those of a crocodile.
This is in fact one of the earliest known fish to have ventured onto land. Feel for its four, stubby fins – two on either side of its body. These featured elbow-like joints that meant it could move between shallow pools in search of prey. This is part of the evolutionary journey that would eventually lead to the four-legged land animals we know today.
For directions to the next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 5a
NARRATOR
With the tactile panel on your left, we’re going to keep moving forward along the pathway. After a short distance, you’ll come to a four-way crossroads. To the left is the wide, sweeping pathway that would take you back down to the Transport for London tunnel entrance and timeline wall we’ve already visited. To the right, the path leads you up to the low, rectangular café building. There are toilets in here.
Our tour continues straight ahead, though. Across the junction, on either side of where the path ahead begins again are two more information panels with bronze tactile objects attached. When the sun is shining, these catch and reflect the light, making them glisten beautifully. To the left you can feel a giant millipede species from 305 million years ago. Our next stop is the panel to the right of the pathway entrance which will introduce you to the Coal Forests of the Carboniferous Period.
To hear more, select the next track.
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Stop 6
NARRATOR
On the right-hand side of this panel is a bronze tactile representing the patterning found on fossilised carboniferous tree trunks. Tom tells us more about this period.
TOM MCCARTER
The next stage is the Carboniferous period, and this is where you see all the gigantic Dicksonia antarctica tree ferns, and an understory of other ferns. And that's trying to tell the story of the Carboniferous period, which is when life went from very small and then diversified massively.
And we've got the kind of wet, tropical, rainforests that kind of created the coal deposits that we have surrounding us today. The plants in that period that we know of aren't actually represented in the gardens because they're all extinct, so we had things like seed ferns or lycophytes, giant equisetum, things like that. We don't have those today, so we've used proxy species essentially.
The biggest ferns in the gardens have come from a nursery, and they were originally imported from Australia. So they come over – they're quite remarkable tree ferns, Dicksonia Antarctica tree ferns, because you can chop them off at the base and chop off all the fronds, dry them out completely, put them in a shipping container and bring them over to the UK and then re-wet them and they start growing again! Which is quite remarkable because, you know, you can't do that with most other tree ferns. So Cyathea, which is another type of tree fern, you wouldn't be able to do that. They die if you do that. So Dicksonia Antarctica and some other Dicksonia are quite unusual in that respect.
Apparently the first ones, I was told by Dave at the nursery, that they think that the first ones came over to Cornwall as ships ballast. So ships went, in the 1800s, went to Tasmania and parts of Australia and then offloaded and then loaded up with these tree trunks. And when they got back to Cornwall, they unloaded them and then they started growing! So apparently that… I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what I was told!
NARRATOR
For directions to the next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 6a
NARRATOR
With the Coal Forests panel on our right, we’re now going to move forward along the pathway. It’s like the one we’ve just walked down, with light stone slabs meeting dark earth, and lined on either side with different types of benches. Make your way a medium distance to the end of this pathway, which is just a little narrower than the one behind us.
At the end of the pathway, we reach another four-way crossroads. Before we move across turn to your left briefly. Here, set back a little way from the path is a giant, rough, angular column. It’s a coppery-orange colour. This is in fact a fossilised tree trunk! It’s from an extinct group of plants called seed ferns that had a combination of features not seen in any living plants. Like the tree ferns that Tom mentioned earlier, they had fern-like leaves. However, unlike ferns, they reproduced by means of large seeds.
Next, we’re going to enter the part of the garden that is dominated by a life-sized, bronze replica of a Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton, standing over the space as if walking through it.
Facing the crossroads before us, the wide path to the left would again take us back to where we started our tour. To the right, the same path sweeps up and round behind us, leading to the café building, where there are toilets. We’re going to cross directly onto the path in front of us, which has the Diplodocus to the left. Once you’re there, find a spot to listen to the next track, which will describe this area. There’s a wooden bench to your left, and two stone ones on your right, if you’d like to take seat.
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Stop 7
NARRATOR
We’re now in ‘Fern’s Garden’, Fern being the name given to the Diplodocus here by local school children. The skeleton cast is on a kind of island that the two main pathways of the garden encircle in a loose oval shape. The skeleton itself is huge, easily the length and height of a double decker bus. It’s cast in bronze, which means it’s a striking, reflective golden colour. Its head is at our end of the garden island, with its curling tail at the far end, in the direction we’ll be continuing soon.
The space is designed to represent a Jurassic landscape. It’s covered in a light grey gravel, and in amongst this are various rocks and plants. On the far side of the island are a collection of medium-sized deep red stones, which look incredibly rich against the lighter gravel. There are larger, paler rocks in the middle. Lush green ferns and larger spiky bushes are dotted around the space, too.
Just off the path on the side we’re on, to the right of a wooden bench, there are also two large creamy-coloured ammonite fossils, which you’re welcome to reach down and feel. While you’re doing so, here’s Tom to tell you a bit more about the planting in this space.
TOM MCCARTER
So, Fern’s Garden is in the Jurassic period. And the climate in this period, in contrast to the Carboniferous period, was a bit drier, more Mediterranean. So, hot and drier summers and then kind of wetter winters. So, in terms of how we're trying to create the planting to feel, it's more lower growing, drier plants. So, we've got shorter ferns, like austroblechnum penna-marina, which are very short ferns. And we've also started to introduce some other types of plants, like gymnosperms or cone bearing plants, things like cycads and wollemi pine are in this, kind of represented. So, we're trying to, at this point, we're bringing in a few different types of plants rather than just ferns and equisetum.
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Ammonites’, and is read by Noor, one of the young people.
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Stop 7a
Fine texture cracks
eroded away
run fingernails across it
We’ve seen these structures before
snails and sea urchins
little raised areas that form grooves
spirals
an advantageous shape
comfortable to hold
living creatures compact
time in the water
breathing waves
in calm sea
floating companions
captured in a perfect spiral
gradually sinking
curled up
resting
in crowning condition.
Embedded under a thousand trampling feet
but retaining its shape.
Beauty in the grounding earth
A place where there’s time for everyone.
NARRATOR:
We’re going to stay here a little longer, to hear from two of the Museum’s palaeontologists about the emergence of one of the most famous groups to ever walk the planet – dinosaurs! It’s the next track.
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Stop 8
SUSANNAH MAIDMENT
I am Dr. Susannah Maidment and I'm a Principal Researcher here at the Natural History Museum, and I work primarily on dinosaurs.
PAUL BARRETT
My name is Paul Barrett. I'm one of the two dinosaur researchers here at the Natural History Museum, I've been working here for about 20 years.
So actually, I work on the origin of dinosaurs, so one of my big research themes at the moment is trying to work out how dinosaurs first appear, why, and how they took over, and start to expand. So, this involves going back and looking actually at some quite bad material. So, the first dinosaurs are fairly fragmentary, we don't have many skeletons of them, and they only come from a few parts of the world, in particular, mainly from Southern Africa and South America. So, we have a few fragments as clues to try and work out how dinosaurs got going.
So, about 235 million years ago, we find the first dinosaurs on Earth. That's when they first appear. There aren't very many of them in general. Not only there are not many different types, but also just not many of them. There are many other animals and plants that are much more common at the time. So, they're these kind of rare and at the time quite small animals. And trying to work out how we get from these kind of rare, unusual, two-legged animals that were sneaking around underneath tree ferns trying not to be eaten by the other kind of bigger carnivorous reptiles they lived alongside. From there to them taking over the planet is still a major open research question.
SUSANNA MAIDMENT
It's kind of an interesting time as well, isn't it? Because when we think about dinosaurs, we tend to think about the really iconic ones, the big four-legged ones with the long necks and the long tails and these huge, you know, multiple tonne animals. But actually, those first dinosaurs were all two-legged, all had forelimbs that they probably used for feeding and for pulling food towards their mouths, and they weren't very diverse. They weren't actually that interesting! They were kind of a relatively boring group of animals at that time.
PAUL BARRETT
Most of them were probably eating a mixture of kind of meat and a little bit of plant food. There were no dedicated plant eaters like the later Dippy or Hypsilophodon or anything like that. So, they all start from this very kind of basic stock. They were small and it's… no one really knows why they should suddenly have exploded and become much more diverse and eventually become the most abundant large animals on land.
NARRATOR
Later on this tour, we’re going to hear more from Paul and Susannah about two of the dinosaurs here – including the Diplodocus. For now though, the directions to our next stop are in the next track.
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Stop 8a
NARRATOR
Still in the seating area we’ve been for the last two stops, turn so that the diplodocus is to your left, with the direction we’ve come from behind you. Our next stop is a little further along this pathway, on the right-hand side.
To get there, move a medium way forward, crossing the path diagonally so that you’re on the right-hand side. Soon, you’ll come to a collection of objects in a kind of open corner. There’s a freestanding information panel that talks about how reptiles first developed flight, with a drawing of one such creature – a pterosaur. This image is replicated in a metallic inlay on a large, smooth stone that’s on the ground to the left of this panel, which you’re welcome to feel.
Finally, to the left of this is a large, freestanding stone column with a viewing hole cut through it. Sighted visitors can look through this to see a – not entirely accurate! – nineteenth-century sculpture of a pterosaur on the museum building.
Take a moment here to hear more about how these reptiles first developed flight. It’s on the next track.
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Stop 9
NARRATOR
Pterosaurs were a group of flying reptiles that emerged around 228 million years ago. Not quite dinosaurs, and not quite birds, Palaeontologist Mike Day tells us more about how they might have evolved the power of flight.
MIKE DAY
I suppose when you think about evolution, you always have to think about a very, very slow and incremental change. So, there are various theories about how it might evolve. For instance, the classic ones are that these small, light animals would have used it to escape predators by leaping out of trees if they were arboreal and by developing skin flaps it enabled them to sort of fall further, or actually attain greater sizes and then sort of leap out of a tree and cushion themselves as they fell so they were able to sort of escape predators that way.
Then eventually, you know, possibly even sort of jump from one tree to another. And that would have enabled them to maybe jump a bit further and that, within a population, there might be ever so slightly greater an advantage in being able to jump a little bit further than the other individuals in your community. So those small increases in your survival probability, acting over generations, might have led to sort of the evolution of some primitive kind of wing.
And I suppose then you can actually glide all the way to a tree that's quite, quite a bit further away and eventually, you know, flapping flight would give you, you know, it opens up a lot of new space to live in. And for pterosaurs that were doing it, first of all, I mean, I suppose it opens up the opportunity for new feeding strategies. So, a lot of pterosaurs have these, like, long teeth and they probably use them for picking fish out of water like a lot of birds of prey do now, maybe by skimming and just picking them out. And, you know, allowed them to sort of live or possibly roost in areas that were more isolated away from predators.
So yeah, evolution tends to do that! So, if there's sort of an opportunity there, things might get into it. And then once that initial sort of morphological change has happened, then they can sort of spread and diversify into all these different areas. You never know, if they'd carried on going, you might have pterosaurs that completely lost the ability to fly, like birds do on these small islands. When it no longer is beneficial, you've got all this muscle mass for flying, but if there's no predators around, why fly? Just walk!
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Flight’, and is read by Aliza, one of the young people.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the following track.
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Stop 9a
Hearts squint
Look up
The tiniest ant dreams
Illuminating above
Bravery
Takeoff
Cold air
Brace, brace
Rush
The membranes of wings
Feathers
Undulating
Waves
That push
Of Emotions
Nausea clenching
Stomach dropping
Rollercoasters
Swooping upwards
Flying
Along bird song
Ringing against the silence
Our Ancestry
Old species
Advised us to
Find new species
Soaring
One glass full of emotion
One hand in the stars
Born from the Earth
Pink rays of sun
Spread at dawn
Screaming, wake up!
Children going to school
Laugh and play
Flying
Fairy wings
Casting a spell
The span of our arms
Tiny antennae
Singing for attention
Over a colonized land
As they watch over
Spinning Earth.
In flight.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the next track.
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Stop 9b
NARRATOR
We’re now going to continue along the path we’re on, moving away from this display on some of the first flying reptiles, to one on the earliest mammals. We’re going to pause on our way to feel some more incredible fossils, though.
Move further along the path a short way, and cross back to its left-hand side. Soon, you’ll come to another free-standing information panel, quite low down and just off the pathway. It’s surrounded by three examples of fossilised tree trunks – a large one behind the panel, and two smaller ones down to the right of the panel. These two small trunks are probably the easiest to reach down and touch – and you might notice that they’re colder than the other things we’ve touched on the tour today.
These fossils were made when movements in the Earth’s crust caused enormous floods that drowned entire conifer forests here in southern England. Over time, minerals replaced the woody tissues of their trunks, and the result is these fossilised tree trunks.
It’s a short distance to our next stop. Move back onto the path, and head diagonally across it to the right. Here, you’ll find a large boulder with an information panel attached to the side, and a small bronze tactile of a shrew-like animal affixed to the top. Once you’ve found it, you can hear more about this early mammal in the next track.
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Stop 10
NARRATOR
The bronze tactile creature you can feel on this rock is a replica of one of the earliest known mammals. It’s a megazostrodon, which lived 200 million years ago and was probably most active at night, feeding on insects. As an early mammal, it had evolved traits that helped it live an active lifestyle – for instance, changes to its limbs that would have made it more mobile.
Early mammals were also able to generate their own body heat, meaning that unlike colder-blooded reptiles, they could survive in cooler regions, which opened up whole new territories to them. Some early mammals may also have laid eggs, rather than giving birth to live young, similar to a modern platypus.
For directions to your next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 10a
NARRATOR
For our next stop, we’re going to head round to the other side of the large diplodocus, which is still to our left, and double back on ourselves slightly. With the early mammal tactile to your right, continue a short way forward along the path. On the right you’ll come to another information panel with two raised tactiles on. These represent dinosaur footprints – the one on the left is round and stocky, while the one on the right is long and slender with clearly defined claws at the end.
Once you’ve felt these prints, continue along this path until the end. There are benches along both sides. When you make it to the end, we’re now parallel with the wide, sweeping path that started by the timeline wall and runs the whole length of the garden. We’re going to take a hard left here, moving around the dark, cylindrical light bollard that’s placed just off the path. The sound of traffic from the road will now be on your right.
Keep moving a short way along the path, down the other side of the diplodocus, the lip of the stone pathway gives way to loose gravel on your left. Soon, you’ll come to a second of the dark cylindrical light bollards. Pause here, as just beyond it, towards the diplodocus skeleton, is a second smaller bronze skeleton cast. This dinosaur is a Hypsilophodon. Palaeontologists Paul and Susannah are back to tell us more in the next stop.
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Stop 11
NARRATOR
This dinosaur is a Hypsilophodon. Paul Barrett and Susannah Maidment tell us more.
PAUL BARRETT
Hypsilophodon is a small plant eating dinosaur. It comes only from the Isle of Wight and its fossils are about 125 million years old. It's from the early part of what we call the Cretaceous period. And this is an animal that's only a couple of metres long, it walked on its hind legs only, and had a very long, counterbalancing tail.
SUSANNAH MAIDMENT
I think one of the most interesting things about Hypsilophodon is that we know pretty much the entire record of Hypsilophodon from a single strata of rock, a single layer of rock on the Isle of Wight. And this has long been considered that these animals died in a herd, and they were a herd of animals, maybe juveniles, maybe not even adult individuals, and they were killed in some catastrophic flood event or something like that, and they've been preserved in this one rock.
We have almost no other evidence of these animals from anywhere else and so we've just got this single herd. Now, some recent research by my research group here and at the University of Birmingham has suggested that maybe this isn't actually the case and that what we're beginning to see is actually, we probably had a floodplain environment where we've got river channels moving through it over time.
And at some points we've got Hypsilophodon being washed down the channel. At some point there might have been a herd in some sort of mass death event, but there are others that were just dying on the floodplain, and we might have had carcasses on the floodplain. So, we've got perhaps a more normal fossil assemblage than, than we thought that we had originally.
NARRATOR
For directions to your next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 11a
NARRATOR
Continue forward along the path a short way until you come to a boulder that has a small information panel attached to it, and a large bronze replica of a diplodocus skull perched on top. It’s fixed in place, so do take a moment to feel it – you might be able to recognise its many slender teeth. While you’re exploring it, Paul and Susannah will tell us more in the next track.
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Stop 12
NARRATOR
Paul and Susannah tell us a little more about the ongoing scientific questions around the feeding habits of this Jurassic giant.
PAUL BARRETT
Because this is a big animal, it would have had to eat several hundred kilos of food a day, just to keep going. But it has this tiny head. The head is only about the size of that of a horse. And it's only about twenty centimetres wide at the front. So, it has twenty centimetres of mouth to get hundreds of kilograms of food in it.
And what we decided was it was probably using those teeth rather like a comb or a rake. And it's raking those teeth along branches and using them to ping leaves into the mouth. The leaves are being swallowed whole and were going down that long neck into a huge capacious stomach, where lots of gut bacteria do their work on it to break it down and give it the energy that it needs to keep going.
SUSANNAH MAIDMENT
It's one of the questions about Diplodocus and the other animals that lived alongside it, right, is how they got so big and the sort of amount of food that they would've needed to eat all day. And diplodocus is from a group of rocks in the western US called the Morrison Formation. And this is a group of rock that are from the upper Jurassic period around about 150 million years old.
And so there's this big question, well, how could this one area, which is reconstructed to have been relatively arid, have supported all of these huge herbivores, the largest terrestrial vertebrates that ever walked the earth? We think they probably herded. We've got evidence from the same rocks of footprints and trackways where there appear to be many individuals walking in the same direction, so it looks like a herd of animals.
And they must have absolutely devastated large forests and things like that. So, it's a real, kind of, question mark I think, still, about these animals is, you know, how much food did they need to eat to maintain their body size? Was it as much, was it less than we think it was actually? And, does that explain how they were able to live in arid ecosystems?
PAUL BARRETT
It's also possible, of course, that there weren't as many of them as we thought there were today. So, we tend to think of reconstructions of these kinds of scenes with dozens of these animals in. But it could be that actually there were fewer of them, and that they were widely ranging and migrating around large distances in order to get as much vegetation as they can in these relatively plant poor environments.
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Adaptation’, and is read by Aliza, one of the young people.
For directions to the next stop on the tour, listen to the following track.
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Stop 12a
Hm…
Small. Beak?
Bird – but it can’t be, it’s got teeth.
Crow? No.
These teeth feel quite blunt, but there is a lot of them.
Dolphin.
Or something else?
Mainly because of the jaws
Tiger? (those are sharp teeth)
Wouldn’t want to be nibbled on by that!
Hm.
All these teeth.
Wouldn’t like to smell that breath!
They’d need a lot of toothpaste.
Imagine a badger using toothpaste.
These teeth…
Do they
Snap!
Munch?
Mulch?
What about these ones?
Some pointed teeth
Some square.
Must eat green stuff.
Are they even teeth?
Huge!
Are those teeth or bricks?
Elephant.
Too much teeth for me personally.
Creatures bite
Bitten
Time
Biding.
How resilient we are.
For directions to your next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 12b
NARRATOR
We’re now going to head back the way we came. If you’re facing forward down the path with the diplodocus skull to your left, turn 180 degrees so you’re facing the end of the garden we haven’t explored yet. The diplodocus skull should be on your right.
Head along the path a medium way until you reach a four-way crossroads. To the right is the path we originally came up. We’re going to take the path to the left, which leads into a small circular space. All around the edges are large stones of various shapes and sizes, some of which you can take a seat on if you’d like. In the middle is a little planted area.
Around the edges are some larger trees. We’re going spend a little bit of time here, so feel free to explore this circular area or take a seat while you listen to the next few tracks. The first will tell you more about the dramatic moment in Earth’s history that this space represents.
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Stop 13
NARRATOR
66 million years ago, an asteroid collided with earth. At the time, Earth was already struggling thanks to large-scale volcanic activity. When the asteroid hit on top of this, its impact was devastating. Giant tidal waves flooded coastal areas, wildfires raged further inland, and acid rain fell – all spreading death and destruction. On top of this, dust clouds blocked out the sunlight.
As it grew cooler, plants stopped photosynthesising and turning light energy into chemical energy, meaning they died. As they died, so did the animals that fed on them, and as a result of that, so did their predators. It was in this way that mass extinctions spread up the food chain.
Following this devastation, life did begin to recover, though. Changing climates and shifting continents drove the evolution of new plants and animals, and the modern world that we know today began to take shape. New fruits and flowers emerged, and mammals replaced dinosaurs as the largest land animals. As climates cooled, grasslands and open plains appeared where there had once been large areas of forest.
As a series of ice ages came and went, humans evolved in Africa, and would eventually spread across the whole world – ultimately becoming the force of nature we are today.
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘Extinction Level Event’, and is read by Tyreece, one of the young people.
Otherwise, to hear more about the period of time following the asteroid strike that this small area represents - Tropical London - play the following track.
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Stop 13a
Before there was nothing,
On the rotating black circle
A burst into colour
Herbivores,
Carnivores,
Omnivores
It will be millions of years until they’re found
Singing in the shower.
In the middle of shuffling a video card deck
Playing piano: Bach Fugue in D Flat Major.
Watching a comfort movie.
In the park walking a dog.
The rotating blue and green circle
Changes colour again
Dead bones become fossils under the ground.
To hear more about the period of time following the asteroid strike that this small area represents - Tropical London - play the next track.
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Stop 14
NARRATOR
It might surprise you to learn that southern England was once covered in dense rainforest. Picture mangroves and palm trees lining the coast, while crocodiles and turtles lived in our rivers and shorelines. We know about this warmer climate thanks to fossilised plants and animals that have been preserved in the thick deposits of London clay which lay beneath much of London and southeast England.
For instance, we know that birds would have flown among the trees of these lush rainforests, while small primates climbed through their branches picking fruit to eat. In doing so, as they moved around, they became unwitting agents of seed dispersal for these plants. Meanwhile down on the ground, the earliest known horses would have been grazing on shrubs.
We’re going to leave this enclosed area now. For directions to your next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 14a
NARRATOR
To get to our next stop, move back to the pathway entrance of this little enclosed area where we came in. You’re now back at the four-way crossroads. Move directly ahead across the main path and you’ll soon come to our next stop: a freestanding information panel about early flying mammals. To the ground on the right of this panel is a flat-fronted, medium-sized rock, into which a metallic depiction of an early bat has been inlaid. Feel free to reach down and touch it.
This bat would have lived 52 million years ago, flying through the trees searching for insects to feed on. Other early bats fed on nectar, pollen and fruits, with some even eating small birds, mammals, and fish. Bats remain the only mammals to have evolved powered flight, and today make up one-fifth of all mammal species. To hear more about these amazing animals that we live among today listen to the next track.
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Stop 15
NARRATOR
Becky Clover, Urban Biodiversity Officer, shares how bats are still one of the most exciting animals to hear in urban environments.
BECKY CLOVER
I'm always quite excited to see and hear bats, especially in urban areas because many people probably don't realize that they can be really quite successful in suburban and urban areas. Some of the species we've got, and lots of bat species, have kind of adopted human structures like houses and stuff for roosting rather than the trees that they might traditionally have roosted in.
I love that you could have a little pipistrelle bat, which are tiny and often weigh less than a pound coin, and they're really common in urban and suburban areas in the UK, and they could be roosting under like a roof tile or a tiny crevice behind your soffit board. You wouldn't even know it's there unless you kind of stood there at the right time after dusk, and they're really secretive and quite kind of magical, so it's a real treat when you see them and hear their amazing echolocation calls!
I think there's something quite cool about the first-time people hear the bats calling with a detector. It's quite exciting because it's not anything you've ever heard before!
NARRATOR
For directions to your next stop, play the next track.
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Stop 15a
NARRATOR
From your position here by the Winged Mammals panel, we’re going to continue up the wide sweeping pathway. Although you can’t feel them, as you move forward there are lots of shiny metallic footprints inlaid into the smooth stone floor. These represent the evolution of various mammals at this point in our journey through time. They soon give way to human footprints. The footprints used here in the garden actually belong to the Museum's Young Photographers participants!
Keep moving along until you reach a very large stone plinth laid into the ground just off the right-hand side of the path. There’s a hole in it that offers sighted visitors the chance to spot more terracotta creatures on the museum building.
There’s a little rough gravel and grassland between us and the long, sweeping wall that curves round the outside of the ramp leading up to the museum entrance. There will probably be lots of people up there, so we’ll take our next stop here. It relates to the 3D metal quotation that has been cast and affixed about two thirds of the way along the wall. It’s a quote from Sir David Attenborough. To hear more, select the next track.
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Stop 16
YOGI NAGAM
Hello, I'm Yogi, I work on the National Education Nature Park team, who are running a schools project encouraging young people in their schools to get mapping the habitats in their own outdoor spaces, and then making changes and improvements for nature on their own school sites.
We're standing in front of a quote that was unveiled by David Attenborough that says, ‘the future of the natural world on which we all depend is in our hands’. When I read that, I feel empowered that we can make change collectively, together. The idea that it's not just one person's responsibility, or somebody else's responsibility, but something that we can share. Both in the responsibility to protect, but also in the gifts that the natural world gives us. Whether that's, like, a nice flower to look at, or just being outside in clean, fresh air. That is pretty cool. It belongs to all of us. We all need it. And there are actions that we can all take together in a way that will make positive change for the climate and environment.
And what's really cool is we kind of know what some of those things are. We know that there are actions that we can take that will at least help to mitigate climate change in the future. And I think what we're left to discover after reading that quote is how we can work together to ensure that those changes happen. I think it gives us a large and important responsibility, which can feel pretty scary, but I think knowing that there's actions that we can take collectively makes me feel pretty positive about it. So, I think it is a positive quote… just with a scary undertone! [Chuckles]
NARRATOR
In the next track, you can listen to one of the poems written by a group of young people, inspired by our Gardens. It’s called ‘The Fossil’, and is read by Precious, one of the young people.
Otherwise, this is the final stop on our tour of the Evolution Garden. For directions on how to continue your visit, play the following track.
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Stop 16a
Sometimes a moment can last a long time
Sometimes a long time lasts a moment
Every minute, second, hour or day something changes
The one thing I really wanted to feel
Is the one I didn’t get to feel
I just wanted to enjoy the water
The vibe, the ocean
A fallen tree fossilised in a few days
A moment
A thousand
350 million years and then
Humans
And pollution
And trawlers
And single use plastics
unimaginable marks of destruction
in their wake
All while I was just trying
Trying to say “it is beautiful here.”
Before it’s not living anymore.
We are the blueprint of your actions.
Use the time wisely.
Fossil Found.
For directions on how to continue your visit, play the following track.
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Stop 16b
NARRATOR
That brings us to the end of our tour of the Evolution Garden. Continue making your way up the wide sweeping path we’re on. You’ll soon notice it turns to the right, and will find yourself at the exit of the Evolution Garden. There are tall red and gold railings to your left, separating you from the pavement and Cromwell Road. You have a couple of options here.
If you want, you can now enter the museum building into the central hall. Inside, there are toilets and a café.
However, if you’re following this audio tour of both gardens in order, now it’s time to head over to the Nature Discovery Garden! To get there move directly forward, all the way across the courtyard. You can follow the tall red railings to your left to help you get there. Once you reach the entrance to the second garden, play the next track for some words of introduction.