Original subtitles

In the heart of London is an incredible world.

The Natural History Museum,

home to 8O million sensations of nature

from dinosaurs to whales,

giant squid to billion-year-old rocks.

It's probably the most important fossil of a dinosaur

that there is anywhere in the world.

Now, our cameras have been allowed behind the scenes...

This rather large crate reminds me of something

from the movie Indiana Jones.

...to meet the team...

...keeping it up and running...

Who's a good boy?

I think they're gorgeous.

...welcoming up to five million visitors a year...

...and bringing its unrivalled treasures to life?

So this is the oldest thing that we have in the museum.

It's actually older than the solar system.

In this episode, the museum prepares for its biggest-ever exhibition.

You've got wizarding world and magic and you've got a dinosaur.

What else do you need?

A major new investigation about its star attraction.

And getting up close and personal

with some of the museum's strangest specimens.

See those little faces? Aren't they cute?

You are looking at the backside of a maggot,

which always makes me giggle.

Here we go, to infinity and beyond!

This is the Natural History Museum

as you've never seen it before.

The Natural History Museum holds the greatest natural history

collection in the world.

Thousands of visitors flood through its doors each day to see

everything from dinosaurs to dodos,

sea monsters to giant sloths.

And the star attraction that draws the biggest crowds is Hope,

a giant skeleton of the largest mammal on Earth, the blue whale.

The first time people come in and they see her

diving down towards them, there's a lot of wow moments

and the children are great, they're like...

Every visitor to the museum will pass under

this four-and-a-half-tonne, 25-metre-long skeleton.

And checking she's safe to hang high over their heads is a crucialjob

that can only happen out of hours.

It won't be a good look, Rob, if you crash into it.

OK, I'm just saying.

Today a team of specialists are checking her over...

Big bit coming, look.

Ooh, look at that.

...led by Head of Conservation, Lorraine Cornish.

So you can appreciate access to Hope is very challenging for us.

She looks magnificent, but looking after her takes a little bit

more time and thought.

When you're 130 years old, like Hope,

your skeleton is fragile,

so needs to be kept under constant watch.

We go through the whole length of the skeleton.

Bit like a medical record where you check through

and then an inspection.

Just less is more.

I just need him to make sure less is more, all right?

No more, Rob. Back off.

As soon as they get up close,

the team spot that Hope needs attention.

Underneath the skull in the palate area

there's quite a few cracks.

And on some of the vertebrae they're quite large and heavy.

They've got some cracks and joins.

Are they opening up any more?

Are they stable?

They now have just three clays to check over 200 bones

to make sure she's secure.

Even though Hope's been in the museum for over a century,

very little is known about her life,

but that might all be about to change.

Behind the scenes, hundreds of world-class experts

are uncovering secrets about the natural world.

Richard Sabin has been the museum's whale specialist

for the past 29 years...

...and he's embarking on a new investigation into Hope.

This rather large crate,

which reminds me of something from the movie Indiana Jones,

actually contains a surprising part of Hope.

The crate contains parts from Hope's vast mouth.

This is the filter mechanism, the strainer that blue whales

have inside their mouths to strain their food from the ocean,

things like krill, small fish.

We've got about 800 of these inside this crate

and this isn't something that people get to see.

This is something that scientists get to play with,

and I'm in a very privileged position.

You know, we've had Hope in our collections

for just under 130 years

and she's effectively been a mystery for most of that time.

I've made it my personal mission to basically become a detective

and find out as much information as possible about Hope's life,

to add flesh, if you like, to the bones to really develop that story.

Today, Richard's taking tiny samples from Hope's mouth plates,

which will be analysed using cutting-edge techniques

to reveal new information about her life.

This is where it starts to look a little bit like I'm a drug dealer.

This may just look like dust, but actually it's very important dust...

...and we've developed techniques now that allow us to extract

very, very detailed information using chemical analysis

from these individual plates,

and this will be used to answer more questions about Hope's life.

Richard is hoping the samples will tell him exactly where Hope lived

and how far she travelled.

But first they must be sent to a specialist lab

before he gets his answers.

The dinosaur gallery is one of the most popular and terrifying spaces

in the museum,

housing skeletons of T Rex and triceratops...

...alongside life-size animatronic models.

So if something goes wrong,

it's a big problem.

This morning, engineers Alex and Glenn have had an urgent call-out

to one of the malfunctioning robotic dinosaurs.

So this one we think needs to have the back of his neck looked at.

There are a lot of children genuinely terrified of these things.

Recently these models were taken down into our workshops

and had the fur and the feathers added,

rather more like the fluffy toys we sell in the gift shop.

The motor in its neck has stopped working

and now the dino's head won't move properly.

To avoid some very disappointed kids,

it's crucial they get it up and running

before the museum opens for the day.

We've got deadlines to stick to here.

We've got the public in in half an hour so we've got to get this

down into the workshop and have a closer look.

Can you make this part move, Glenn?

The head turn, that one.

Alex and Glenn need to open her up.

Children come to the museum and expect to see them working.

It's a big disappointment when they're not.

It's one of the things that people complain about

if the dinosaurs are not working.

Fortunately, with a spanner, a spare part and a bit of elbow grease...

Right, let's get it back upstairs.

...the dino is up and running again.

I'll have it running before ten.

He says he feels better.

That's a job well done.

Children will be in in half an hour.

Back to terrifying the kids.

Coming up, Lorraine is up against it.

This is where the magic is going to happen.

This is where the exhibition is going to be.

And the world's most-prized dinosaur fossil.

I'm a little bit scared to touch it.

It's just absolutely priceless.

It's impossible to put a value on this specimen.

The Natural History Museum is gearing up

for the biggest exhibition it's ever held.

Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature

is inspired by the famous movie about the wizarding world,

and the museum needs it to be a huge hit.

They'll be displaying fantastical creatures from the film

alongside some of the real-life animals that inspired them.

This is where the magic is going to happen.

This is where the exhibition is going to be.

But time is tight for Head of Conservation, Lorraine Cornish,

who has just weeks before it's set to open to the public.

So now we're ready to start installing over 120 objects.

It will take six people a month to do that

so everyone's getting all the specimens ready

and then this space will be so busy with people

right up to the 11th hour, normally.

Literally the night before, we're usually still doing things.

Today, Lorraine is getting her first peek at some very special items

from the film that have just arrived from Warner Brothers.

With thousands of fans expected to visit the exhibition,

it's vital that everything is in perfect condition

and it doesn't disappoint.

These are super special,

so I want to make sure we're looking after them.

This very large, odd-looking thing is the horn of an erumpent,

which is one of the fantastic beasts in the film.

We're just checking it over to make sure everything's as it should be.

There are some cracks here, but they're deliberate.

They're not ones I should be worried about, so that's OK.

It's not every day you handle an erumpent horn, though.

Few people can say that.

It's just great. It's such fun.

The erumpent is one of the fantasy creatures that escapes

from Newt Scamander's suitcase

and is a bit like a magical rhinoceros.

So this is Newt's suitcase

and who wouldn't be excited at carrying it?

So Newt Scamander is the main character

and he's what's called a magizoologist

and he goes around the world

and he looks for and studies fantastic beasts.

Getting all this stuff out

is like Christmas and birthday rolled into one.

This is the wand for Newt Scamander.

I so wish I had the magic wand.

Sometimes I just want to say, "exhibition ready" and it's done.

Having unpacked today's movie props,

Lorraine now has just over 100 to go,

including the exhibition showpiece -

a brand-new dinosaur.

The Natural History Museum is home to over 8O million different items,

but its rarest are kept under lock and key,

hidden away at the back of the museum's main hall

in the Treasures Gallery.

Today, one of the museum's dinosaur experts, Susie Maidment,

has been granted special access

to examine the most-prized fossil in the entire museum.

This is Archaeopteryx.

It's probably the most important fossil of a dinosaur

that there is anywhere in the world,

and I'm a little bit scared to touch it.

It's just absolutely priceless.

It's impossible to put a value on this specimen.

At 147 million years old,

this bird-like dinosaur is so highly valued

because it was the first fossil to reveal that every species of bird

alive today evolved from dinosaurs.

Susie's been at the museum for two years

and is one of the very few experts allowed this close.

She's making a record of the fossil for other specialists to study.

It is a bit stressful being this close to it.

This case is almost never opened.

It's very, very exciting for me to be able to have my head

inside it right now and to be able to get a really close

look at this fossil without the glass in the way.

Archaeopteryx was discovered in Germany in 1861

and has been at the museum for over 150 years.

And it's the mix of its features that makes it so intriguing.

This specimen has a number of characteristics of both

dinosaurs and birds.

We have these beautiful feathers

which are so characteristic of birds.

We've also got a wishbone,

which is a bone in the shoulder region which helps birds fly.

And we've got a claw on the foot

that allows the birds to perch on branches.

There are also a number of quite clearly dinosaurian-like features.

You can see it's got a very, very long tail and we don't

have tails in modern birds that aren't just made of feathers.

So these sorts of features make it much more similar to dinosaurs

than to birds.

I thinkjurassic Park has a huge amount to answer for,

for our opinions about what dinosaurs look like.

We tend to think of dinosaurs as being these kind of big, scaly,

reptilian-like animals.

But actually what we now know

is that many of the meat-eating dinosaurs were feathered

and I think this kind of changes our opinion about

what dinosaurs might have been like.

They were probably very bird-like in their behaviour

and actually many of them we wouldn't have been able to

distinguish from birds today.

And I think when you look at some types of bird,

if you've ever looked an ostrich in the eye,

I think they look a bit like dinosaurs, actually.

Everyone who works at the Natural History Museum

has a favourite part of the collection,

including housekeeping supervisor Debbie Marlow.

Hers are the ancient skulls and skeletons.

We are now entering Human Evolution.

This is my lovely heads.

I think they're gorgeous!

I mean, look at their lovely faces.

Nice chiselled eyebrows.

Nice dinky little ears.

Very handsome.

I'm giving them a lovely massage now

cos they deserve it.

It's my little salon.

Debbie's favourite gallery displays skulls, skeletons

and models of early humans going back seven million years.

He could do a bit of a haircut.

I'll have to tidy that up.

Beard needs doing.

I think any barber would love to have him.

It looks quite cheeky, actually.

He's quite a cheeky chappy, isn't he?

He's like, "Hey, baby!"

"All right. Oh, yeah. I'm all right, ain't I? What you think?"

He's one of them.

"Hey, look at me!"

He's definitely not my type, though.

He can smoulder as much as he wants, it's not working on me. Sorry, love.

Should have jeans and T-shirt on.

He'd be all right then.

Look, do that - censored!

Should put a big warning up before everyone comes in.

Ready for everyone to come and have a good look at him now

in all his glory.

Over in the museum's main hall, the conservation team

have been investigating the cracks in Hope,

the museum's 50-year-old Blue Whale.

Now, Head of Conservation Lorraine is giving the museum star exhibit

a final inspection to ensure she's safe for the thousands

of visitors who will walk underneath her.

So this will take me up, up and away...

...so that I can get up close and personal with Hope

and have a look.

Here we go, to infinity and beyond.

I always worry that I'm going to go and hit her, but I know I won't.

I don't mind heights, but this is quite wobbly,

so the height's all right, but then when it starts to wibble-wobble...

...it can be tricky.

I'm looking at cracks,

so the mandibles are amazingly heavy,

and if you can imagine, the structure is being supported.

So we're really looking at structural stability.

We're just watching some of the historic older cracks

so that they're not opening up.

We have to just make sure that we're happy with those cracks.

They haven't opened any wider.

That's why we take lots of pictures and just keep an eye on things.

Fortunately, Hope's cracks haven't opened up

and she can be passed as secure.

SHE SIGHS

Here we go.

Job done for now.

Lovely, lovely.

Behind closed doors, whale expert Richard Sabin is trying to uncover

the mysteries of Hope, the Blue Whale's life.

He's keen to find out exactly where Hope may have lived

and how far she travelled.

It's been weeks since he sent Hope's samples for investigation,

He's received the results and they're extraordinary.

The analysis of the chemical make-up of Hope's mouth plates means

he can now chart previously unknown details of where she migrated

during the last few years of her life.

What we're actually looking at here is Hope's journey,

1886 into 1897.

This is the route that she would have took from the north

between Iceland and Norway, south towards Cape Verde.

Then we have her return journey.

This is her going north again.

We can see that every year Hope was effectively doing a round trip

from the feeding grounds in the north,

down to the warmer waters off the west coast of Africa.

Looking at this distance on the map,

you're talking about 6,000 miles in the space of a single year.

That's remarkable for any animal,

let alone an animal that's out in the ocean.

The fact that I'm plotting a journey that was made by a Blue Whale

over 140 years ago really does quite blow my mind in all honesty.

And to think that we could actually add information about her life

in so much detail, it makes it very emotional.

It's something that you don't normally encounter

with museum specimens in natural history collections.

But around two years before Hope died, the trail runs cold.

In the penultimate year of her life, that's 1899 into 1890,

the data becomes very, very unclear.

She's still in these warmer waters off the west coast of Africa...

...and she stays there and we don't really know why.

This is where the real detective work comes in.

Richard needs more tests to find out why Hope suddenly stopped migrating.

The museum's biggest exhibits might pull in the crowds,

but less than 1% of its collection is on display to the public.

The rest is kept for research

in special access areas like The Cocoon,

which is in the museum's west wing.

The cocoon is crammed full of over 20 million specimens,

including two-and-a-half million flies

reserved for scientific research.

Erica McAlister is one of the experts in charge

of this collection, and flies are her life's obsession.

Everyone who starts off on flies is like,

"l don't know how to pronounce that."

My advice with a lot of scientific names is just go quickly.

You can look at whales and they're great and they're fun,

but I can go into my garden

and I can see more mayhem and mischief there

than I will by looking at a whale.

Obviously, I have a bent for slightly unusual

and entertaining behaviours.

Look, look here.

See those little faces? Aren't they cute?

You see their little face?

It's not their face.

Obviously, that's their anal spiracles,

so you're looking at the backside of a maggot,

which always makes me giggle.

Can you not see the little dot on top of the end of the pin?

That's obviously a fully-formed adult fly.

These are commonly called the no-see-ums,

and there's a specific reason for that, because they are quite small.

So that obviously is a pig's foot.

In it it's got loads of little holes where the fleas live.

We get these in humans.

So those romantic walks on the beach,

not so romantic when you've got a flea burrowing through your foot.

And then this is a lovely example of the chicken flea

and they live in the lids of chickens.

If you look on their eyelid,

you can see little rows of tiny little fleas.

This is quite amazing. It's got to be slightly itchy, I guess.

So now I can use these to horrify you,

which is great for education reasons.

So we have all these beautiful models.

Erica's collection also includes some 90-year-old wax models

that are supersized versions of the real specimens.

I could show you my pubic lice in a minute.

That is always a winner.

Everyone has favourites

and the pubic lice are mine cos, you know, look at them.

So here we have a head lice and a pubic lice

and I think it's pretty obvious which one is which.

One lives on your head and your thorax.

Your hair is slightly different there to your hair

in your nether region.

Therefore, their claws are shaped differently to hold on to

different types of hair.

And you can see why they call it crabs, as well,

because it's definitely got a crab-like structure to it.

It's brilliant.

They're dying out.

We don't really know why.

It could be deforestation, but we don't know.

Coming up, the museum welcomes a new dinosaur to its collection.

I'm super excited to get this beautiful dinosaur.

It's just going to be spectacular.

And a new discovery about Hope.

I've taken a look at the results and processed what's come back.

I'm incredibly excited by this.

The Natural History Museum covers an area

the size of 200 tennis courts

and has five cafes, three shops and 28 different galleries.

Making sure this huge museum is ready for the public

is a mammoth task, and it's all down to duty manager jack Evans.

Eva, can I grab the sales radios?

Have a good day. See you in a bit.

He has just 45 minutes to get everything ready

before the museum opens for the day.

The museum's a very glamorous building

but I reassure you that there's not always glamorous sides to the job.

Jack manages a team of 65 front-of-house staff

who run the 14-acre site.

It always gets to this time,

and it gets a bit more exciting

cos the visitors are on their way.

The top of the stairs, always knackered.

I think by the end of the day, we're all kind of like this,

like keeled over.

It's such a physicaljob.

My step count will probably be about 23 to 25,000 steps a day...

...like 12 flights of stairs,

so you've got to be quite athletic, which I'm not.

Hello, Control. Duty Manager, over.

Just checking in with housekeeping

to see if the building is clean enough for us to open

and I'm not getting a response.

This is the Duty Manager calling.

Any available housekeeping supervisor or manager? Over.

It's kind of a bit rude if they don't answer.

Hi, there. just to double check that the museum is squeaky clean

and ready for our visitors? Over.

Hello, Control. Are we ready to open the museum on time?

Thank you. Out.

We are indeed.

Time is ticking for the museum's major upcoming exhibition,

Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature.

Head of Conservation Lorraine Cornish and her team have to prepare

over 100 items,

including the replica skeleton of a recently-discovered dinosaur -

Dracorex Hogwartsia.

The original is in America, where it was discovered in 2004

and is named after Harry Potter's school.

I'm super excited to get this beautiful dinosaur.

It's going to be the centrepiece of our exhibition with the most

amazing name, Dracorex Hogwartsia,

dragon king of the Hogwarts.

It's just going to be spectacular.

You've got wizarding world and magic and you've got a dinosaur.

What else do you need to start your exhibition?

The complex skeleton has arrived in pieces without a manual

and needs assembling.

So Lorraine has called in dinosaur expert Susie Maidment.

As a dinosaur researcher, what part are you interested in?

Most dinosaur experts like skulls, to be honest with you,

because skulls can tell us a lot about feeding and things like that,

and they're a bit more personal. They are a bit more personal.

Well, you know, we do have... Have we got the skull?

...the replica skull here. Can I have a look?

Yeah, I've got it on here with all the other bits here. OK.

Can I pick it up? Yeah, yeah.

It's in really good condition, and it's really robust.

Oh, it's light, OK. Yeah, and it's really light.

Don't you think that looks just like a dragon?

It just looks exactly like what you imagine a dragon looks like.

I know, I know, I know. It's so cool!

But Lorraine has discovered a problem with the replica skeleton.

What's happened here, though? Well, I was hoping

we could put it together today, so that we could show you.

But unfortunately, it's travelled across from the US,

and so some of the pieces were damaged.

The one thing a conservator fears

is undoing that crate and something is broken.

And in this case, we found pieces of the dinosaur lying at the bottom.

And so there's a sort of intake of breath and like,

"OK, let's have a look and see how much damage we've got."

And so we've got ribs completely broken off,

whole pieces broken off entirely.

I've got some more pieces over on the table.

So we will be able to repair it,

but it will take four or five days, which we hadn't planned for.

We've got to somehow find the time

to now repair this beautiful dinosaur

so that we can install it.

Richard Sabin has been

looking after the museum's whales for three decades,

But his love of the Natural History Museum

stretches back to childhood.

I first remember walking into this hall

and seeing this blue whale model as a ten-year-old.

It was the first time I'd ever been to London,

the first time I'd been to the Natural History Museum,

and this was the thing that really blew me away.

Standing in front of this model

makes me remember how excited I was when I first saw this.

One of the things that I really wanted to do

when I was ten years old on that first visit

was take a look at the model close up.

And of course, now that I work for the museum,

that's exactly what I can do.

Nobody else - just me.

Richard's childhood visits

would spark his lifelong love of whales.

As a ten-year-old, I was all about bones,

I wanted to know about skeletons, and seeing the skeleton

of the largest animal that's ever lived on the planet

was just the most... the most incredible thing,

I had to know more.

I had no idea

that I'd end up working with Hope so closely

and in so much detail.

And she's really become the pinnacle of my career so far.

Who knew? Who knew that was going to happen?

That could never be predicted.

After months of research, Richard has made a breakthrough

in his investigation into Hope.

He's been able to trace where Hope travelled during her life,

but then the trail goes cold.

It appears that, in the last years of her life,

she suddenly stopped migrating.

Richard has an idea of why this was,

and he's just received an extraordinary set of results

that confirm his suspicions.

I've taken a look at the results and processed what's come back,

and what we can see very clearly -

very, very clearly, and I'm incredibly excited by this -

is that we have evidence

that Hope had been pregnant, full term.

These results show that Hope was pregnant

during the last years of her life.

With this new information,

Richard can now pinpoint exactly when she gave birth.

The graph that I've got here

is the data that's come back from the analysis.

And smack in the middle of the graph

is this huge spike in progesterone, the pregnancy hormone.

So we have a birth date for Hope's calf

of February 1890 based on these data.

This is really quite remarkable.

And the really wonderful thing for me is that...

...if her calf lived its full lifespan,

that means it would have been swimming around in our waters

around about 1970 or so.

If that calf in turn had had offspring,

maybe, maybe, just maybe,

Hope's grandchildren are swimming around still in the oceans today,

following that same migration route.

But the research has also revealed a darker side of Hope's story.

Alongside the pregnancy hormone, the progesterone,

we've also analysed the levels

of a stress hormone called corticosterone.

Now, this stress hormone is actually elevated

in the period leading up to

and the period including Hope's pregnancy.

What we have to remember

is that Hope was living at a time of increased commercial whaling,

a time when blue whales

were taken right to the very edge of extinction.

There was a massive intensification in hunting of blue whales,

because they were so commercially desirable.

And Hope was living through the peak of whaling.

She probably would have been much more vulnerable

as a pregnant female,

and it's a terrible thing to think

that she was about to give birth

at a time when things were looking so bleak for her species.

Even though whaling was approaching its height,

Hope escaped being slaughtered and gave birth.

But records show that, a year later, she became stranded

and died on a sandbank

as she journeyed past Wexford Harbour on the Irish coast.

Richard still has an important question that needs answering.

It's one of the mysteries which is still pretty much an open question,

is why Hope died, why she...beached in Wexford Harbour.

I really need to do a bit more thinking

about what I still believe to be the last open question,

which is...why did she beach?

How did she manage to strand, such a powerful animal?

Maybe these data can give me a little bit of insight.

Coming up - the museum's new dinosaur refuses to take shape.

This is like a giant Meccano set

that's full of very fragile pieces that you're trying to put together.

And Hope's last secret.

There's a mystery still to be addressed, the final mystery.

The deadline is looming

for the Natural History Museum's upcoming exhibition.

With a broken replica dinosaur on her hands,

head of conservation Lorraine Cornish

is having to work round the clock to assemble its complex skeleton.

The clock is ticking, we have a schedule planned,

and now this is an additional piece of work that we've got to do.

So any bits of spare time that we thought we had

we don't have any more, and we're doing this.

This whole ribcage section here

had actually broken along quite a few of those lines.

So what I'm doing is just that bit of in-painting

so you cannot see where that break happened.

This has taken up quite a lot of time,

and I'm going to nickname it

a little bit of a diva dinosaur, to be honest,

in terms of the attention it's demanding from us.

But, you know, it's worth it, absolutely worth it.

With the repairs complete,

Lorraine can finally try to assemble the dracorex skeleton.

This is like a giant Meccano set

that's full of very fragile pieces that you're trying to put together.

So you're literally building a dinosaur.

It's getting longer.

Yeah, it's nice and long now, isn't it?

You feel like you're gradually bringing it to life

as you put each piece on.

It's just like an enormous jigsaw puzzle but quite a challenging one.

Jigsaw puzzles usually behave a little bit better

than this dinosaur is.

Dino expert Susie Maidment

is joining Lorraine for its crowning moment.

Hi, Lorraine! Hi, Susie, how are you?

This looks good, much better than last time I saw it!

So much better, isn't it?

You've just caught me pinning the tail on the dinosaur, literally!

This is the last bit of tail, so I've got you down here

because there's one more piece to put on, Susie.

The skull!

So can I do the honours, Lorraine? You can, Susie.

I've saved the best till last for you. How exciting.

It's all quite simple. Yeah? That's it.

Then put him up a little bit more... Like that? Yes, exactly.

There we go. Yeah.

There he goes. Right. Are we letting go? Yeah.

Hey... There he is.

There he is!

Look at that! Oh, handsome!

This specimen looks fantastic.

I can't believe how different it looks from when I saw it.

I think it's going to be the star of the show,

as it should be as a dinosaur.

So you've got Harry Potter, Wizarding World, dinosaurs, dragons.

The whole mix is there, isn't it?

The public are going to absolutely love this specimen.

It's been a busy day for duty manager jack Evans and his team,

who are just getting ready to close up.

Attention, all front-of-house radio holders.

This is the duty manager.

The museum is now closed to the public.

Please can you start clearing the galleries wherever you are?

Thank you. Out.

Gearing up now for closing.

I'm just going to sweep the galleries

to make sure that there's no-one hiding

in the kind of strange hiding places in here.

You never know... what you might find.

It's kind of nice, actually,

to walk through when there's no-one here,

even though it's a bit creepy in some areas.

It's nice, you can kind of have some one-to-one time with a donkey.

This is probably a good spot to edge people on to the doors.

We obviously don't want to force people out the doors,

but we've kind of got this gentle lean-in

and kind of graciously nudge.

Richard Sabin's 18-month investigation

into Hope the whale's life story is coming to an end.

He's plotted her route across the globe

and discovered that, in the last years of her life,

she gave birth to a calf.

But there's one question that still needs answering.

What caused this giant blue whale to beach

on a sandbank in Wexford Harbour on the Irish coast?

There's a mystery still to be addressed,

and it's the final mystery.

It's the mystery of why she died, how she died.

What were the circumstances?

Richard has finally pieced together the story of Hope's last hours.

It's my feeling that it's probably down to two main factors,

the first one being she would have been weakened by the pregnancy

and by feeding that calf for all those months,

investing all her energy in keeping her calf alive.

There's another factor.

We know from records that, in the days before she appeared,

on the south-east coast of Ireland,

there were terrible storms in the area.

And I have a dreadful feeling

that Hope may have been caught by those storms,

that she may have been pulled into

the incredibly tidal waters of Wexford Harbour,

into the shallows,

and didn't have the strength to break free,

had no way to get herself out of that predicament.

Hope died on the morning of 25th March 1891.

And remarkably Richard has uncovered a photograph in an Irish museum

that matches the exact date and location of where Hope was found.

It shows the blue whale in her final moments.

I've got a photograph here that shows Hope

lying on a sandbank in shallow water

on her right-hand side,

with four men standing on top of her body,

and she's being released, we believe, from her misery

by one of the men who made a harpoon,

a home-made harpoon, and...

...and plunged into her body to...

...to, um...release her.

It really does have quite an impact and, you know, just...

It does bring her to life, really, to have this information.

Ultimately, when I stop and think about it,

it's...it's quite overpowering, it's quite overwhelming.

Richard has solved the 50-year-old mystery about Hope.

And soon, everyone who comes to the museum

can discover more about her story.

Even though this is an incredibly sad story,

there is a... a silver lining to all this.

People will get to know this story,

and I really think it will surprise and inspire them.

We've created an incredibly powerful message of hope,

and Hope's story is an example

of what the Natural History Museum is all about -

using our collections to inspire people, through science,

to look after, protect and conserve the natural world.

Next time...

...a new dinosaur discovery...

It slightly blows your mind, doesn't it?

...gruesome secrets from our prehistoric ancestors...

So these teeth marks must be from a human.

This is definitely cannibalistic behaviour.

...and the most famous dinosaur of all time.

Dippymania has taken over.

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