All language subtitles for Natural History Museum World of Wonder Series 1 Part 3 1080p

In the heart of London is an
incredible world,

The Natural History Museum.

Home to 80 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...

SHOUTING: Geronimo!

...keeping it up and running...

Who's a good boy!

I think they're gorgeous.

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

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

...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 solarsystem.

In this episode, putting T-Rex back
together...

I don't know which bone goes with
which skeleton.

...coming face-to-face with deep sea
monsters...

Some of these animals you might not
even realise are actually real animals.

...and getting starstruck by Sir
David.

David Attenborough himself has put a
sample into this very tank.

He stood on that step.

He touched this handle.

Here we go, to infinity and beyond.

This is the Natural History Museum
as you've never seen it before.

The Natural History Museum is one of
Britain's top attractions.

Every year millions of visitors flood in to get up
close to the giant skeletons and exotic creatures

that fill this world-famous site.

But, of the thousands of extraordinary exhibits,
by far the biggest draw are the dinosaurs.

From prehistoric bones to man-made
models,

if something goes wrong in this
gallery, it's a big problem.

And, today, it has.

The most popular dino of them all,
the robot T-Rex, has developed a fault

and needs urgent attention.

We want to get the tail off and have a look at
this cylinder in here that we think's squeaking.

We've not come across this before.

Technicians Glen and Alex have
been called in to try to fix T- Rex's tail

which is making a worrying rattling
noise.

We need to give it a little squirt.

It's not the first time T- Rex has
gone wrong.

Six months ago there was a problem
with his head.

T-Rex was shaking his head, violently.
It was completely out of control.

The body was shaking and it
was head banging.

For young kids this is terrifying.

Yeah, pretty dramatic.

He kept that up for the best part of
an afternoon

before somebody told us about it.

Because this thing weighs a couple of tons,
it caused a little bit of damage elsewhere.

Until Glen and Alex can get to the
bottom of the rattle, T- Rex is off limits.

Let's get the tail down, which is the position
we've got it in now, and we'll slip the rubberoff.

Can you slide it off?

OK?

It brings a lot of pleasure to a lot
of people, and terrifies them.

Children come round this corner and
are terrified. They scream.

It's great for that.

When the T-Rex isn't working we get
lots of bad press from the, erm, parents.

And lots of crying children.

Mind your head, Glen.

With T- Rex turned off whilst they
figure out what's gone wrong,

they take the chance to give him a
top-to-toe MOT.

The eyes are looking OK. It's mainly the
eyelids that wear out rather than the eyes.

His giant jaws make him a target.

Kids that come here use the T-Rex as target
practice. We find all kinds of things.

Pencils, sandwiches, crisps,
M&Ms...

You name it, they try and get it
in his mouth.

No flying objects this time.

All good.

Ah! That's what's wrong.

Finally, they discover the source of
the rattling.

And it's not good news.

Part of the catch that holds the
tail on has snapped.

It could cause another problem along
the line.

Once that happens, that's when we
lose control of the robot.

T- Rex will now be out of action
until Glen and Alex have fixed him

and they're sure he's not a risk to
the public.

But they'll need to get their skates
on.

While robot T-Rex awaits urgent repairs,
deep in the basement there's the real thing.

Remarkably, the museum holds the skeleton
of the first T- Rex ever discovered.

But clino expert Susie Maidment
has a problem.

The huge bones of this 66 million-year-old
T-Rex have been muddled up with another T- Rex.

Today, Susie is setting out to
solve this giant jigsaw puzzle.

At the moment, I don't know which
bone goes with which skeleton.

So, that's what I'm going to try and
figure out today.

It might be a bit surprising that
all of these bones are jumbled up.

We have so many dinosaur specimens in
the museum to look after and, up until now,

this specimen hasn't really been the
focus of any attention.

So, I'm hoping to correct that
today.

These T-Rex bones were dug up in Wyoming
in Mid-West America over 100 years ago.

They're incredibly historically important specimens,
so it's pretty amazing to be getting them out

and handling them today. Wow!
They're heavy, too.

This is a metatarsal, which is a foot bone.
It's the one that footballers always break.

It's pretty long. That was the
height of T-Rex's foot, without its toes.

But there's something else mixed up
with the bones.

KNOCKING

That's plastic T- Rex.

These specimens were mounted in the dinosaur
gallery for a really, really long time and

the missing bits that we didn't have of the
skeleton were filled in with plastic, like this.

Erm, so, I think, we can
probably get rid of these now.

This looks like it could be quite fragile. This is
a big, back rib. So, it's broken at the endhere.

It would have continued on and
tapered down to nothing.

The ribs can be really, really
fragile because they're so narrow

and they've been around for 66
million years

so they can just collapse under
their own weight.

50, sometimes, you have to be
super careful with them.

This is the lower jaw.

There we go, look at those

massive teeth.

It's these teeth and this jaw that
gives the T-Rex its fearsome reputation.

Can you see these steak-like knife
serrations

that would have allowed the T-Rex to
cut through flesh?

The idea of being chased and eaten
by a T-Rex, oh, it's terrifying!

It had a bone-crushing bite and these
massive teeth would have chomped

through most of the other
things that were alive at the time.

Three hours later and 66 million
years after they were alive,

Susie has sorted one T-Rex from
another.

This is maybe a half of a T-Rex that we
have here. All of the neck and the back.

Haven't got much of the tail by the looks of
things, but its bones are in pretty good nick.

I actually really enjoy having a
good tidy up of the collections.

I don't like mess. I have a very clean house.
I like to have a very clean collection as well.

Coming up...

...we discover the museum's gruesome
underwater world...

This is the tentacle of a Colossal
Squid.

...and the most daring mission the
museum's ever undertaken.

No-one's ever done a project like
this before.

The Natural History Museum is home
to giants of nature

that are millions of years old.

But, behind the scenes, experts are busy
on cutting-edge projects for the future.

Lyndall Pereira is working on one of the most ambitious
missions the museum has ever been involved in.

Called the Darwin Tree of Life
Project, its aim is simple but staggering,

to collect and store samples of every one of
the 60,000 species of plant, animal and insect

that's alive in the British Isles
today.

So, what we're trying to do with
this project is get a tissue sample

from every single species in
Britain.

Two hundred years ago, they had to collect the
entire organism and store them in museums like this.

Now, we can learn so much from such
a tiny sample.

Here, in one of the most high-tech parts
of the museum, is a tank of liquid nitrogen

where the samples will be stored at
minus two hundred degrees.

This tank can fit 60,000 of these
tubes so there's enough space to fit

one sample for every species
that you can find in Britain.

We're taking the DNA from these
organisms that will stay in here safely

for the next 300 years, at least.

And we can learn so much from them.

David Attenborough himself has put
a sample into this very tank.

Stood on that step.

He touched this handle.

This tank is a Noah's Ark for the
21st century

with its samples of every living
thing in Britain.

It's going to take at least another
ten years to fill

but it's a race against the clock.

We're losing species at a faster rate than we can
even discover them so, we need to find them and

learn as much as we can about them if we
have any hopes of saving them in the future.

No-one's ever done a project like
this before.

It's going to be a big challenge.

We have about a thousand species in this
tank so far, so we have 59,000 still to go.

Before the visitors arrive for the day, Housekeeping
Supervisor Debbie Marler gets to spend a little extra

time with some of her favourite
displays.

As a cleaner, you get to see a lot more of what the
public don't see because you've got no distractions.

You can actually stop and look at
everything in detail.

So, this is a case of humming birds and
there's more than a hundred birds in here.

These birds are from South America
and each is a tiny treasure.

I love this case. They just look
like little diamonds sparkling.

It's amazing.

They're tiny little birds that can
give off so much colour.

Their beaks are so thin they're like
tiny little sewing needles.

There's no way you can get bored at
looking at all this stuff.

Every time you look at it you find
something different.

It's like watching a movie.

I've spent a lot more time cleaning
this case than a lot of other things.

In the far corner of the museum
there's an area where

only those with the strongest of
stomachs will venture.

Jon Ablett is one of those in charge
of this mysterious world.

This next room holds some of the most amazing,
bizarre-looking creatures that you've ever seen.

Some of these animals, you might not
even realise are actually real animals.

And we call this part of the museum
the Tank Room.

This vast room is filled with rarely
seen creatures from the deep.

All perfectly preserved.

This is the tentacle of a Colossal
Squid,

what we believe is the largest
species of squid.

They've never found a fully grown
Colossal Squid, only juvenile ones.

But we think they reach up to about
18 metres

and this one came from
the stomach of a sperm whale,

one of the few animals that is big
enough to eat it.

One of the amazing things is these
hooked suckers that they have

and these are used for grabbing on
to their prey.

These actually turn and screw into
the flesh of anything that it catches

to stop them from getting away.

Today, Jon's preparing some
cuttlefish for a new exhibition

about fantastic beasts.

He needs to work fast while they're
still fresh.

One of the amazing things about
alcohol preserved collections is

the fact you've got the whole
animal.

You could cut this open and see what
it had eaten just before it died.

You could investigate it for parasites, there
are some many more things that you can do

which is why they really are truly
amazing specimens.

These came from Cornwall, they came up this
morning, so we're going to start with this one.

It's, er, probably the most complete
and in the nicest condition.

I'm going to arrange it into the pose we want it
to stay in, because the fixing preservation will,

kind of, harden out the tissues and,
er, make it less flexible.

Handling the special preservatives
is dangerous work.

This chemical, formalin, just stops
the rotting process.

There's a few frozen patches so it's a little tricky
to get the syringe in but we just need to get enough

of the chemical in to fix it from
the inside, as well as the outside.

It stops it from degrading and, hopefully,
the specimen will last hundreds of years.

Next, the cuttlefish will be immersed in a tank
of formalin so that it's preserved inside and out

and in ten days, it'll be ready to
go on display.

The most prized specimen in this undersea
world is the biggest and strangest of all.

This is Archie, giant squid. I have quite a
big personal attachment to this specimen.

She's about 8.62 metres in length and it came to the
museum in 2004 when it was caught by some fishermen

off the coast of the Falkland
Islands.

They pulled up their nets, found
this amazing creature.

Archie is a girl, er, it's quite
easy to sex a giant squid

because they are one of the few
squids

to have external penises, in the
case of a male,

er, and for a male giant squid

the penis would be about a metre in
length so...

no metre-length penis, definitely a
girl.

This complete giant squid, almost
the length of a double decker bus,

is one of the few anywhere in the
world.

It took 20 people to prepare this specimen and
it's now one of the museum's biggest attractions.

It's incredibly rare to get a
complete giant squid.

You can see it has an eye on either
side

and it has the second largest
eye of any living creature.

You can see in this specimen, there
are some very, very large suckers.

And this is what they use for
grabbing on to prey,

pulling it back so they can hold it
and eat it.

This is the closest that most visitors
will ever get to a deep sea giant.

People relate them to these monsters of the deep, you
know, the kind of stories of these grabbing sailors,

pulling boats down to their depth

and, just to have a glimpse of this
huge animal, that,

until relatively recently, people didn't know was
actually a real animal, is really truly amazing.

In the heart of the English countryside, Hever
Castle in Kent was once home to Anne Boleyn,

the second wife of Henry VIII.

This morning it's part of the most ambitious
project the museum's ever been involved in.

To collect every one of the 60,000
species alive in the British Isles today.

A dozen museum experts have arrived at dawn ready to
collect and record rare species living in the grounds,

starting with the castle's
creepy-crawlies.

So, now, we're looking for old
trees. That one looks good.

Beetle expert Max Barclay is on
the hunt for ancient bugs

and he's using some old-fashioned
methods to get them.

I'm beating this oak tree because
oak trees support probably more

species of insect than any other
species of British tree.

There's about 15 or 20 different species of insect
on this beating tray so, erm, where did that go?

A little flea beetle there.

Some of these trees are, at least, a
couple of hundred years old

and there's probably been a kitchen garden here
since the castle was built, so there will have been

a succession of trees and the beetles
associated with the trees would have passed down

from generation to generation. 50, they will be
able to trace their lineage back to the Tudors.

People ask me whether I have much
time for people who don't like insects, but

I don't really know any people who
don't like insects.

But, while Max is beating trees, some of the
team are still struggling to get started.

You've got to pull it out. It should
just come.

É

First challenge of the day.

CHEERS

How are we going to manage the
trestle tables?

That's the next challenge.

Project leader Lyndall Pereira will make
sure all the specimens collected today

are identified and recorded on site.

That's if they can get the kit
working.

Do we have power? Yes, we do!

Here we go.

Station's ready.

These samples must be flash frozen so they can
be rushed back to the museum for DNA analysis

and permanent storage.

But that means getting their field
equipment to sub-zero temperatures.

This is dry ice. This is where the specimens will
come, this is like the flash freezing point in here.

And, it's, yeah, minus 80, so it's
super cold.

Today, the team are searching for the smallest
creatures to be found in the castle grounds

because they're the most important.

The big animals are wonderful and charismatic but,
in terms of what they actually do for us ashumans,

I don't think it can compare to what
insects do.

For the team, any changes to these small
creatures could mean big trouble ahead.

Insects are like the canary in the coalmine,
they warn us of environmental change.

And when insect populations start to
change, we should take notice because

sooner or later, those changes will go on
and affect other animals, like ourselves.

The team are hoping to catch as many
new specimens as they can.

For the day to be a success, they
need to find specimens

that haven't yet been stored in the
museum's giant tanks.

The gardens have been untouched, so
to speak, for about a hundred years or so,

some of the parts anyway, so I think
that there's a good chance that we'll find

a lot of things you wouldn't find
anywhere else.

The Natural History Museum holds
more than 80 million specimens

that have been collected over
hundreds of years,

ancl Blanca Huertas is one of the experts
responsible for some of the most beautiful.

She oversees the biggest, and most spectacular,
collection of butterflies and moths

anywhere in the world.

She's been at the museum for 15 years and
butterflies have become a bit of an obsession.

Once you get into butterflies, you
can get a little bit mad,

and you don't stop thinking of them,
you don't stop collecting them...

Blanca has five million butterflies
to look after and, every year,

passionate, private butterfly
collectors send her thousands more.

Every year I receive about 20,000
new butterflies to come

into this collection, into this
building.

So, I need to rearrange everything again,
just to put one or two specimens inside,

so it's a never-ending job,
never-ending.

I can tell you, I do this every day
of my life

for the last 15 years.

The butterflies come in all shapes,
sizes and packaging.

We got hundreds and hundreds of boxes like
this and they contain specimens from 1911

and they send it on cigarette boxes,
on biscuit boxes.

People used to keep butterflies

in cuts of newspapers, I get very
distracted reading all of the stories.

This is the story of a lady who is
recommending soap with the smell of roses.

So there's, er, curiosities, lots of
curiosities in this collection.

This is the Queen Alexandra
butterfly,

the biggest butterflies in the
world.

This is called the Blue Morpho, it's
flying in Colombia, where I come from.

It's just such a big collection, you
never finish anything.

And when you do it's about five or
six years of your life taken,

only on one minor, minor corner of the collection,
so, so they take your life, definitely.

Coming up...

...getting T-Rex back on his feet...

Who's a good boy!

...and the museum's smelly secret.

When it first comes out of the
animal it smells like crap, literally.

The Natural History Museum is in one
of the richest neighbourhoods in Britain,

but buried beneath its newest wing
is a foul-smelling secret.

A hundred years ago, huge dead whales
were brought to the Museum to rot

in specially dug, shallow graves
called whale pits.

Once they'd rotted, their skeletons
could be added to the collection.

Whale expert Richard Sabin knows
all about them.

These were huge holes in the ground
full of sand.

You put your specimen into the sand,
cover it over, leave it for a year or so.

The bugs and the beetles come along
and they do their business

and they munch away at all the soft
tissues and, after about a year,

you actually end up with something
that looks exactly like

this wonderful photograph.

It does generate an awful lot of
smell and,

with the wind in the right direction
on a nice, warm summer's day,

you get complaints from the
neighbours, unfortunately,

living in South Kensington, working
in South Kensington.

Probably not the best place to be
burying partially decomposed whales.

There were quite a few complaints and I
think that's probably one of the reasons why,

along with the Second World War, the
practice stopped.

And there are a few more surprising
secrets from these gentle giants.

This hundred year old waxy lump might not look
like much, but it's from a sperm whale's intestines

and is extremely rare.

You'll smell it before you see it.

Known as ambergris, it's been used
to make perfumes for centuries.

And a piece this size would have
been worth thousands of pounds.

This used to be more valuable than
gold. Can you smell it yet?

It's a really unusual material.
It's basically made up of

the parts of the animals that the
sperm whale eats, things like squid.

When it first comes out of the
animal it smells like crap, literally.

Once it emerges from the sperm whale it floats
to the surface of the ocean and then the waves

start to wash away that horrible kind
of faecal smell, the poo smell that it has.

These lumps can float on the surface of the ocean
for months or years before they wash up on beaches

and are found by people.

It has quite a pleasant, sort of,
musky, slightly sweet odour.

I love the smell.

I really do.

Ambergris was also loved by royalty.

There was a recipe that was a
favourite of King Charles the Second

and it was, like this scrambled
eggs with shavings of ambergris.

Er, very unusual. Highly acquired
taste, I should imagine.

Richard has spent the last 29 years in charge of
the museum's huge, and popular, whale collection.

I think one of the things that really makes whales
fascinating for people is the fact that they are so

unseen, unknown, mysterious.

For centuries, millennia even, these
huge creatures have been such a surpfise

when they appear on our beaches. They suddenly
appear from their world into our world.

In the grounds of the museum is a
new building known as the Cocoon.

In this eight-storey tower, hundreds of
experts are busy with cutting-edge work.

Today, abseiling cleaners Paul and Killian are
polishing its 90-foot-high, concrete surface.

So, the Cocoon is where you store
all the creepy-crawlies.

I've never been in there myself though, erm,
cos I'm not the biggest fan of creepy-crawlies.

Erm, and that's eight floors of
creepy-crawlies so...

I'm a bit too scared to go in there, to be honest.
Especially wood lice, they freak me out, too many legs.

This is quite a complicated thing to
clean, actually.

It looks really nice. It's an interesting
building but I feel like the architect

forgets the guys cleaning it
sometimes.

It would be really convenient if they
painted it a different colour, a bit darker.

We're just trying to get all the dust off, make
it look nice and white and pretty for the public.

So, it's kind of, like, er, extreme
housework, really.

Geronimo!

Right, it's looking good.

OK, nice and white again.

One of the museum's most popular attractions
is its vast collection of stuffed animals.

From ostriches to elephants,

giraffes to gorillas,

some of these animals are over 150
years old

and the collection is one of the
biggest in the world.

He looks alive. Look at his eyes.

But less than half of the collection
is on display.

At a top secret location, far from the
museum, thousands more fill a giant warehouse.

Some of them have just been on tour
abroad,

and today, they're coming home.

Hello! Hi! It's Nicola from the
Natural History Museum.

Oh, perfect, ten minutes. OK.

Getting them home safely means a nail-biting
morning for Head of Conservation Lorraine Cornish.

So, we've got two lorries coming down
here with nine crates, over 70 specimens.

Nicola Farrington is in charge of
today's delicate operations.

We have crates that contain really
huge specimens like deer and antelope.

We've also got Arabian oryx and
orang-utans.

All hands on deck today to make sure
everything goes smoothly.

I think, in there, is a Giant
Tortoise.

Don't quote me on that.

We're always watchful because we
just want them to arrive safely.

The museum's stuffed animal
storeroom lies behind locked doors.

Lorraine is one of a handful of
people with access to this hidden world.

You put the lights on, everything is still but,
suddenly, all the eyes are there, just looking.

It's a complete treasure trove for anyone who gets
the opportunity to come and see behind thescenes.

People who are fortunate enough to come
into this space, and there aren't many,

are always completely amazed.

It's a world of wonder.

They've all got their charm.

Some are more charming than
others, possibly.

This one always amuses me, you've
got the fangs coming out here.

Looks cute, but also menacing all at
the same time.

This probably stood in a Victorian
parlour or something.

You can see the wire so where the
claws are gone.

He looks to me like he would've been
holding a tray or something.

So, just hiding around the corner, literally,
because they're too big to go on any shelving,

we've got some giraffes just hanging
about and I like to come and see them.

It makes me feel quite small when I stand
next to this one, but it is rather lovely.

I like to come and stand amongst
them, it's quite calming.

To Lorraine's eagle eye this world-renowned
collection is more like a stuffed animals' A & E.

I mean everything I look at I want
to treat.

Bit of a split bottom situation.

This one, oh, just looking over and
saying, "Pick me! Pick me!"

There was a bit of literaljaw dropping on
this one and so they've just, er, improvised

and they've done a bit of a crepe bandage
just to, kind of, hold everything together.

But there's one type of creature that's
never welcome inside the secret store.

Pests are our enemy number one when
it comes to protecting the collections.

You don't really see them but if
they get in

and they start eating their way
through a collection

there's nothing left, so we have to be vigilant,
we have to be on it and it's just a war.

These stuffed animals, returning today, can't
just be unpacked, they need to be quarantined

in case they've brought back any
unwelcome visitors.

What we do is we put them into freezers,
take them all the way down to around minus 30

so we can make sure that anything that
has come back, little pests, little beasts

on the taxidermy, will not be alive
when we take them into the storeroom.

With 70 specimens returning today, it's a squash
and a squeeze to get them into the giant freezer.

A bit like a jigsaw, isn't it?

We've got an orang-utan coming off
just now.

There's a troublesome tuna that I'm quite
fond of, that's one I want to look at.

It's now 72 hours of deep freeze
before Lorraine and Nicola can see

whether their animals have returned
home safe.

Can't wait to get into the crates.
We've got to wait for a few days for that.

Inside the dino gallery, robot T-Rex
has been out of action

needing urgent repairs to his tail

which has been making a worrying
rattling noise.

That's the new part back in there. This is
all nice and tight now that rattle's gone.

Nice, straight back. Knees bent.

Today, technicians Glen and Alex hope that
he'll finally be ready to meet his public again.

You get the controller.

Mind your back.

Who's a good boy?

We'll have the audience back in,
in the next half an hour.

A lot of smiling faces, that's
always a good thing.

With his tail firmly back in place,
Rexie is back up and running.

This is one of the better things to
repair. There's immediate, erm, thanks.

ROARING

At Hever Castle, expert collectors from
the museum are busily raking the grounds

for rare British wildlife.

It's part of a unique nationwide
project to make a record

of every species alive in the
British Isles today.

All the grass here is just absolutely full of
insects and spiders. I've got tons in here.

Insect expert Gavin Broad has just
found a rare wasp.

You've got a parasitoid wasp. This is
one of the wasps that eats insects alive.

It's a kind of gruesome biology but
it's fascinating from my perspective.

It's cleaning its back legs now.

Got to keep yourself looking spick and span.
It's got to go and attract a female, hasn'tit?

So, er, got to look good.

While fellow expert Ben Price has a very
different type of insect in his sights.

I'm catching dragonflies. This is
a blue-tailed damselfly male.

They're really fast, you can't catch them from in
front because they'll just dodge out of the way.

You've got to sneak up behind them.

This is, er, also a damselfly. You
can see it's an incredible green colour.

The hat, the shorts, sturdy boots and a net is
pretty much unchanged from the way insect collectors

would have collected a hundred years
ago.

Ah! Although shorts were a bad
choice today with all these nettles.

I'm not quite tall enough. I can't reach
most of the branches on these trees.

Bug expert Max Barclay is beating
rare beetles out of their hiding places.

That's a rather nice insect. This is the
forest bug. It's one of the stink bugs, er,

these produce a very unpleasant
smell when you handle them

so I'm not going to poke it too
much.

So, that's Chryptocephalus pusillus,
this little beetle here.

I bet we haven't got one of those on
the project.

The team will only know if their
wildlife treasure hunt has been a success

when it comes to the final
tally in just a few hours.

There's more than 20,000 species of
insect in the UK and,

er, it's always exciting for me when
I see

something that I've never seen
before.

Coming up...

...we find out if the stuffed
animals are still in one piece...

There's not often that you can say
you've looked into an orang-utan's armpits.

...and an incredible new find on the
Great British Bug Hunt.

Oh wow! Yeah.

At the Natural History Museum's
secret off-site store,

a group of precious stuffed animals
is returning from a world tour.

Today the museum's Head of
Conservation, Lorraine Cornish,

and Touring Co-ordinator, Nicola
Farrington, are about to find out

if they're still in pristine
condition.

The next specimen is especially
rare.

Looks good.

It looks happy to be home, I think.

This is a Bornean orang-utan, critically endangered,
numbers are still in decline at the moment so,

may yet become extinct. We certainly
hope not.

It's nice to see it back, safe and
sound.

This is how he would have been in the
exhibition, so looking a bit more natural really,

hanging out on a branch or climbing on a
branch so we've got the branch included here.

They have to get up close to make
sure there's been no nibbling by moths.

Can you see under here as well,
Lorraine? In that armpit.

There's not often that you can say
you've looked into an orang-utan's armpits,

but you know, few people can say
that, can't they?

No sign of any insects, which is
exactly what we want to see.

Nothing to see here, which is such
good news.

His eyes are quite dramatic. They
are, aren't they?

Lorraine and Nicola need to inspect the rest of
the fragile cargo to make sure they haven't been

damaged while on the road.

We can take the front off, that
would be great.

It's obviously survived well, hasn't
it? Yeah, it's done pretty good. Yeah.

So, this is an Arabian oryx, which
is a sort of medium sized antelope.

Yep. You all right?

It looks to be without damage, which
is always a relief.

It has survived the journey.

No dead beetles or moths after putting them
through the freezer so that's really good news.

Marvellous. I think we can tick this
one off the list.

Excellent. Yes.

Yeah.

Only now can these specimens be put back
on the shelves until their next world tour.

I think that's a really good manoeuvre there,
Nicola. I don't think I'd be able to do that.

Yes, very happy.

He looks fine and it's nice to see
him back in the store for now,

with all of his primate friends,
so, he'll be very safe here.

He's just enigmatic, isn't he? Maybe
he's thinking about something. Who knows?

It's the end of the day on the Great
British Bug Hunt

and the moment of reckoning for the
museum's team of collectors.

So, that's a little parasitoid wasp.
That's my, my great find of the day.

New to the species list as well.
Yeah, yeah. Not had that before.

It looks like they've got a bumper
crop.

Yeah, it's a...
..dragonfly that I caught.

F

I think that was a pretty good haul.

É

Q

They make a hissing sound as the tube is at
room temperature and it goes into a snap freeze

to almost minus 200 degrees.

50, Laura, we've got quite a lot of
bugs here, and beetles.

Hopefully, some of those are going
to be useful for you.

We've managed to
find quite an exciting selection

of insects and I'm absolutely sure
this will be the first time that anyone has

sequenced the DNA from these
species.

Four or five racks of these today. So, that's
about, that's almost five hundred samples

and that equates to about 100 to 150 species,
30 of which are brand new to our project,

that we haven't collected before and
that's amazing.

We can count this as a
really, really successful day.

Today's haul from this historic castle will
be flash frozen so it can take its place in

the Natural History Museum for
hundreds of years.

Next time...

...an exciting new dinosaur
discovery...

We get to unwrap them and discover
what's inside. It's like Christmas.

...a seven billion-year-old rock
from outer space...

It's actually older than the Solar
System.

...and Max uncovers an incredible
ancient secret.

These beetles were alive when the
Pharaohs were building the pyramids.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media

Good evening,
the headlines from 5 News.

I'm Dani Sinha.

Homeowners are bracing themselves
for more flooding next week,

after Storm Christoph wreaked havoc
across north west England and Wales.

Hundreds of residents
were told to leave their homes

in Greater Manchester and Wales
because of the adverse weather.

River levels are rising,
and flood warnings remain in place.

Lockdown restrictions
may drag into the summer,

according to Number Ten.

Scientists warned it would not
be safe for pubs to open until May.

It comes as the UK recorded
another 1,290 deaths

within 28 days
of a positive Covid test.

And this year's Glastonbury Festival
has been cancelled

clue to the pandemic
for a second year running.

The organisers said their efforts
to move heaven and earth had failed.

The event was
due to take place in June.

That's all, see you soon.