Original subtitles

(pensive music)

- [Narrator] London, a city of commoners and kings,

and at its heart, a museum with secrets dark and strange,

tales of espionage,

(explosion booming)

pickled creatures in hidden spaces,

a cursed gemstone--

(person gasping)

- I won't touch it.

- [Narrator] And Britain's barbaric beginnings.

(men grunting)

Secrets hidden in plain sight

inside the Natural History Museum.

(tense dramatic music)

The Natural History Museum in London, England.

It's a cathedral of nature,

housing over 70 million specimens.

During the day, thousands of visitors tour the galleries

but at night when they've all gone home,

this place seems to come alive

with unforgettable stories about where we came from

and where we're going.

(eerie music)

The galleries and dark passageways invite those who dare

to venture behind the scenes, take a closer look,

and discover secrets that are disturbing

and sometimes brutal.

- Well, we've got material from Gough's Cave

in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset,

and this is some of the material we dug up

in the late 1980s from our excavations there

in really just a small area of the cave.

They're important because they represent people

near the end of the last ice age in Britain,

so they're the best sample we have of people

from Britain at that time.

- [Narrator] 15,000 years ago,

Northwestern Europe was a desolate,

uninhabitable polar desert.

But somewhere around 13,000 BC,

the Earth began to warm up rapidly,

revealing a massive land bridge connecting Britain

to continental Europe,

a gateway for early nomadic man.

- These people arrived really quite rapidly,

probably following herds of animals migrating into Britain.

We think that life was quite hard for these people.

(men grunting)

When we were excavating,

we obviously found not just these human remains.

There were remains of a number of individuals.

On this skull, which is an adult skull,

we can see here cut marks running across this region here.

There are also marks on the frontal bone,

suggesting that perhaps the skin has been removed.

On this jawbone, we've got a series of cut marks here

where the jaw was disarticulated from the skull.

So the material has been pretty extensively worked over

by humans and obviously there are many different reasons

why that might have happened.

May have been an act of desperation,

because, of course, we know cases today

when there had been a crisis.

People have been stranded somewhere.

An airplane has crashed in the mountains

and people, in the end, are forced to eat other people.

(men grunting) (somber music)

- [Narrator] British cannibals, could this be true?

If so, these bones offer evidence

of what some of the very first Englishmen

may have been eating for dinner, each other.

(solemn music)

(water dripping)

To investigate the mystery, we go to Cheddar Gorge

where paleontologists from the Natural History Museum

discovered the puzzling bones.

- Here we are in Gough's Cave, Cheddar in Somerset.

The floor level would once have been really quite high.

This is the site of our excavation.

Essentially, it's the area that was protected by this rock.

This is where all of our finds came from.

We found very large numbers of broken human bones

all jumbled up with the remains of animals

like horses and red deer,

and we noticed quite early on

that the horses and red deer had been butchered

for food and thrown away,

and the human remains appear to have been treated

in exactly the same way.

People have suggested pretty complex ritual explanations.

Archeologists use the word ritual

when they don't know what's going on.

- [Narrator] For more than 20 years,

these bones have been locked away

in a back room of the museum's paleontology department,

the source of the curious cut marks left unknown.

But recent advances in three-dimensional imaging

may provide Doctor Silvia Bello the clues she needs

to solve this ancient mystery.

- Now the image is being scanned three-dimensionally

and you can notice that this series of cut mark

is being reproduced by the scan image.

We can turn our image

and have a proper look at the cut marks

according which angle we prefer.

This is a clear cut mark.

These specific models tell me, well, first of all,

it's a series of marks one next to the other

so the movement, it was a constant sort of fileting

in this case of the mandible.

The angle in this case is quite acute

which means that it was not a cutting angle

but it was more of a deflection angle in this sense.

- [Narrator] The next step is a trip to the town of Cheddar.

Butcher Jim Baker will cut up a pig using replicas

of sharpened stones or flints found at Gough's Cave.

Silvia wants to see how close the cut marks come

to the cuts found on the fossilized human bones.

- These are the sort of tool

that were probably found in Gough's Cave.

- Well, I'm gonna start with this one

'cause this looks like--

- [Silvia] Very sharp.

Are you actually using more strength in this case?

- Not really at the moment.

You can feel that you're right on top of the bone

and there's a scraping motion on the bone, so yeah.

I think it'll get the cartilage out.

(tense eerie music)

- [Silvia] So the cutting is not really a problem

through the meat. - Through the meat's

not a problem at all, no.

It's very, lots of sharp little cutting motions

rather than with a knife, it's a much more

sweeping action, yeah. - One single.

(tense eerie music)

- You can hear it on the bone,

can't you, yeah, yeah. - On the bone.

- It's certainly not-- - It's coming gently.

- It is, it's coming in small pieces,

but, and again, there's that.

(tense eerie music)

That surprised me how easy it was, actually.

Ta-da, there we go. - Wow, yeah.

- Just curious to see if there are--

- Yeah, well, it would be-- - Any cuts left.

Think there's something. - There's definitely cut marks

down through there.

- Yeah, so it'd be very interesting

just to see is it exactly reproduction

of what we have on fossil

which we can prove that they were using the same technique

and possibly the same tool that we have here.

(tense eerie music)

- [Narrator] The pig bones from the butcher shop

are cleaned, dried,

and ready to go under Silvia's microscope.

This is quite interesting

because the location of the cut marks in here

are exactly the same,

so this is the one that has been butchered by the butcher

and there is all this series of cut marks almost--

- Oh, I can see it from here. - Perpendicular,

and you can see exactly the same,

the same orientation, the same location

on the fossil in Gough's Cave.

There's also, you can see all the internal striation

which is the indication--

- Oh, that's fabulous. - That it's

produced by a stone tool.

- [Andrew] Yeah.

- [Silvia] This one, kinda see the same kinda twisty,

the forking at the end.

Microstriation over there and over here,

so they are very similar.

- So we're looking animal remains--

- There will be no doubt.

- It'd be butchering.

- For human, we can't be 100% sure it was cannibalism

but with this evidence, I am 99% sure.

(tense eerie music)

- [Narrator] It's a startling glimpse

into Britain's dark past,

leaving little doubt some of the first Englishmen

were indeed eating each other.

(men grunting)

The Natural History Museum is home

to some odd and disturbing artifacts,

but what can be found in its extensive

and impressive galleries is only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the scenes, the collections stretch for miles,

and tucked away in the bowels of the museum

is one of the most extraordinary

and bizarre rooms in the world.

(dramatic music)

(pensive music)

The Natural History Museum in London, England

is probably most famous for its connection

to the legendary British naturalist Charles Darwin.

His statue graces the main gallery,

a tribute to the scientist who,

in the mid 19th century, changed the world

with his revolutionary theory of evolution.

Today, only a fraction of Darwin's specimens are on display.

The rest are hidden away in vast storage rooms like this one

where the museum's collections line more

than 27 kilometers of shelving,

including their vast spirit collection.

This is the tank room.

Here, thousands of specimens pickled in alcohol

and formaldehyde stare from jars lining the walls.

It's one of the biggest collections of its kind,

and it keeps getting bigger.

(eerie music)

Carrying on the Darwin tradition

is head curator, Oliver Crimmen.

For nearly 40 years he's been adding unique specimens

for future research.

- This is why we call it the tank room.

The larger specimens are here in tanks.

We like our Victorian glass bottles,

but for some of the bigger things,

it's not practical to have a glass jar.

This is an arapaima from the Amazon River.

This one is a particular old favorite of mine.

I used to watch it swimming around

in the London Zoo Aquarium when I was younger

and years later, I found my old friend again

in the museum tank when I got a job at the museum,

so I've known this fish for some years.

The collection goes back hundreds of years.

That means that we have Captain Cook's specimens

in the collection, Charles Darwin's specimens.

You can think of it as a sort of Noah's ark

in a sense that specimens here

that are no longer available in the wild.

One of my favorites is the deep sea relative

of the angler fish.

That mouth is full of sharp fangs

and on the head, there is the fantastic luminous organ.

All you would see of it is the little luminous spots,

probably like a little crowd of luminous shrimps,

and coming to investigate that,

you'd be unaware of the mouth waiting below.

- [Narrator] They may look like your worst nightmare

but to scientists around the world,

there's endless potential for new discoveries

in these pickled treasures.

- This is the head of a basking shark.

It's one of the giant sharks in the world.

It's too big to go chasing around after big prey

so it's swimming along with its cavernous mouth open,

mopping up little shrimps in the sea.

The hydrodynamic trick that sharks have learned

of having little teeth all over their skin

has been very useful to a shark

that's on the move all of its life.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] All along a shark's skin

are V-shaped teeth or denticles.

These denticles direct the flow of water away

from the shark's skin,

greatly reducing the forces of drag on its body.

- Very important if you're a massive fish

moving through water.

Water's 800 times as dense as air,

so it's hard work making a living

moving forwards through water,

and that's why these teeth are so important to sharks.

Now the Speedo company wanted to see

if they could imitate that on an Olympic swimsuit.

- [Narrator] In a sport where the difference

between winning and losing is measured

in hundredths of a second,

Speedo needed innovative new technology

to give their swimsuits the edge.

By studying the denticles

on the skin of the basking shark,

they were able to develop the Fastskin,

a high-performance swimsuit

that mimics the drag reduction abilities

of the shark's skin.

The Fastskin first proved its worth

at the Sydney Olympics in 2000

where swimmers wearing them won 83% of the medals,

a triumph in the pool that may not have been possible

without Oliver Crimmen's lovingly tended specimens.

- This is a good example of the usefulness

of specimens in the collection.

You can't tell what they will reveal to us in the future.

They are the subject matter of endless research.

As time goes on, the collection becomes more valuable

and more important.

(case whirring)

(case thudding)

(menacing music)

- [Narrator] Two floors above the tank room

in the public galleries of the mineralogy department

is a vault full of rare and priceless gems.

It's sealed by a heavy steel door,

a door meant to lock thieves out

(metal clanging)

and keep a deadly curse in.

(dramatic music)

(inquisitive music)

The Natural History Museum in London

is a mineralogist's dream,

containing more than 300,000 samples of the Earth's riches.

The most valuable of these are locked away in a vault,

including a Martian meteorite,

a rare crystallized gold nugget,

and one of the largest uncut emeralds in the world.

They are priceless and irreplaceable treasures.

There's one gem in this collection though

that's renowned not for its beauty

but rather for its dark side.

(tense music)

The purple sapphire is feared.

It was stolen during the Indian Mutiny of 1857

from the Temple of Indra.

Misfortune, sorrow, misery, and even death is said

to befall those who dare touch it.

Many still believe the curse is real,

but not mineralogist Alan Hart.

- Well, this is the blasted amethyst

or cursed amethyst, as it was well-known.

It's a magnificent gemstone, a beautiful amethyst crystal.

This is a very large size

but what's fantastic about this stone

is that it had this great story with it.

- [Narrator] The purple sapphire was given

to the Natural History Museum in 1944

by scientist Edward Heron-Allen.

He was so afraid of the curse

that he placed it in no fewer than seven boxes,

one inside the other, and with the stone,

he enclosed something else: a written warning.

- We do have the actual letter here.

He says here, "To whomsoever

"shall be the future possessor of this--

- [Alan And Edward] "Amethyst.

"These lines are addressed in warning

"before he or she shall assume the responsibility

"of owning it."

(menacing music)

- [Edward] "The stone is cursed and is stained

"with the blood and dishonor

"of everyone who has ever owned it.

(men shouting) "It was looted

"from the treasure of the temple

"of the god Indra at Cawnpore

(gunshots booming)

"and brought to this country

"by Colonel W. Ferris of the Bengal Cavalry.

"From the day he possessed it, he was unfortunate

"and lost both his health and money.

"His son who had it after his death gave it to a friend

"who shortly afterwards committed suicide

"and left it back to him by will.

"Colonel Ferris's distraught son then gave the stone

"to the eccentric Heron-Allen in 1890."

- Heron-Allen was a very interesting gentleman.

They called him a polymath.

He was into absolutely everything like Persian literature,

history of the violin.

I think he was just interested in everything

and that would've involved the afterlife,

the occult, supernatural, and so on and so forth,

and I think this is one of the reasons

why the purple sapphire he took so seriously

and the possible curse.

(eerie occult music)

He belonged to a secret society of mystics,

the Rosicrucians, and believed he could harness

the forces of the afterworld

to neutralize the curse of the purple sapphire.

- [Edward] "From the moment I had it,

"misfortunes attacked me.

"Until I had it bound around with a double-headed snake,

"looped up with Zodiacal plaques

"and neutralized between Heydon's magic Tau--

- [Edward And Alan] "And two amethyst scaraboei

"of Queen Hatasu's period brought from Thebes."

- So interestingly, as a scientist and a mineralogist,

I'm not sure what that means,

so I find it quite interesting that the stone is mounted

in the silver described such as Heron-Allen has

and I'd like to know what that actually does mean.

Is this designed to keep the curse into the stone?

(eerie spiritual music)

- [Narrator] Nehebkau, the double-headed snake,

is an Egyptian god of the underworld

and fighter against evil.

The tau cross, sacred in ancient Egypt

and early Christianity,

invokes the life-giving power of the sun.

And so do the scarabs.

More than 3,000 years old,

these tiny carved stones are symbols of Khepri,

the Egyptian sun god.

Clearly Heron-Allen was desperate

to contain the sapphire's curse,

but still it was not enough.

- [Edward] "In 1903 after another great misfortune

"fallen on me, I threw it in the Regent's Canal.

"Three months afterwards, it was brought back to me

"by the Wardour Street dealer

"who had bought it from the dredger.

"Then I gave it back to a friend

"who was a singer at her earnest wish.

"The next time she tried to sing,

"her voice was dead and gone.

"I feel that it's exerting a baleful influence

"over my newborn daughter (baby crying)

"and I am now packing it in seven boxes

"with directions that it is not to see the light again

"until I have been dead by 30 years."

- [Edward And Alan] "Whoever shall open this

"shall first read the warning

"and then do so as he pleases with the jewel.

"My advice for him--"

- "Is to cast it into the sea.

"I'm forbidden by the Rosicrucian Oath to do this

"or I would have done it long ago."

So rather than cast it into the sea,

what we've done is cast it into our mineral collection.

Do I believe in the curse?

Well, obviously, I don't believe in the curse

or else I wouldn't be handling it like this. (laughs)

(eerie music)

- [Narrator] But the legend of the curse

still holds its power over many,

including Heron-Allen's family.

Ivor Jones, grandson of the former owner,

hasn't seen the purple sapphire in decades

and isn't sure he wants to now.

- [Alan] Here we have the item itself.

- [Ivor] Yes.

- [Alan] The cursed amethyst.

- [Ivor] Blasted amethyst.

- The blasted amethyst, yes, and there it is.

- Yes, we don't want it back.

My mother gave it to the museum

and it was an outright gift, no strings or anything

and what to do, she said, it was up to you.

My personal opinion is that we ought to find out

which Hindu god it was stolen from

and it ought to be returned.

(men shouting)

(gunfire booming)

- [Alan] So Ivor, before we put this back into the vault

on display in the museum,

would you like to hold it for one last time?

(tense eerie music)

- I won't touch it.

- [Alan] Right, yes, yeah, sure.

- And nor would any of my brothers or sisters.

Call me superstitious but I'd rather not.

- [Narrator] Some stories from the Natural History Museum

like the curse of the purple sapphire

are sinister and mysterious.

(air raid sirens wailing)

But others explode with violence,

(explosions booming)

taking us back to the early days of the Second World War

(explosions booming)

(planes droning)

(explosions booming)

when Nazi bombs fell on London

and the museum played a crucial role

in the Allied war effort

when it was a supply center for Allied spies and saboteurs.

(men chattering faintly)

- Three, two, one.

(explosion booming)

(metal clattering)

(dramatic music)

(explosion booming)

- [Narrator] With the fall of France in 1940,

the Allies were driven out of continental Europe

by the Nazis

(people chattering faintly)

but the beleaguered British fought back,

forming a top-secret unit,

the Special Operations Executive, the fabled SOE.

Their mission, set Europe ablaze

with acts of sabotage behind enemy lines.

(explosion booming)

The Natural History Museum became one of their bases.

(machine beeping)

This was where spies and saboteurs were outfitted

with weapons, explosives,

and other lethal tools of their trade.

Wartime spy Ian Fleming spent time here

and later created the gadget-loving character Q

for his James Bond novels.

- The idea was if you were a field agent,

you would be brought here to show

what the SOE could supply you

in terms of weapons and explosives.

(tense music)

So basically it was sort of like a shop.

We're now walking into the marine gallery.

There was a diver standing here in diving gear

and he was the pilot of a small miniature submarine

that was displayed here.

And here was a workshop.

It was from here that they used to make the molds

or the plaster casts of the coal and the logs

and they were hollowed out

and you could hide things in them

and you would put them in your lorry

and if the Germans looked, it just looked like coal.

(explosion booming)

- [Narrator] The camouflage unit was responsible

for some of the most ingenious

and effective explosive devices conceived

during the Second World War.

(explosion booming)

Few of these lethal gadgets remain

but there are blueprints and photographs,

enabling Sidney Alford to reconstruct the past

and discover how they worked.

- I'm weighing out about 200 grams

of plastic explosive called PE4.

I have a certain available volume,

space for the explosive.

I'm going to put it inside a skin of a rat.

I'm replicating a particular type

of what nowadays would be described

as an improvised explosive device, a bomb.

It was to be used particularly

by Special Operations Executive.

I'll just trim the cottons.

I don't think you'd notice that this chap has got insides

that he wasn't born with.

(tense percussive music)

We've made here a representation of a boiler.

The essential is that it has a furnace as part of it.

See, it is quite substantial.

It's made in steel.

Here we have a plain detonator

with safety fuse coming out of it.

I do believe that that detonator

is now inside the body of explosive.

Wherever there was a boiler,

these would be thrown in the path of coal

in those countries occupied by the Germans.

When the stoker comes along,

he would not like the rat to be lying around

in his place of work

so he'd pick it up by its tail or on a shovel

and throw it in the fire.

(tense music)

(explosion booming)

Wow.

Well, it certainly did the job.

I can understand why anyone who's done the experiment

would be scared of rats lying around boiler houses.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] These vintage improvised explosive devices

caused havoc in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Eventually, some of this SOE technology

fell into the hands of the German resistance

(explosion booming)

who were plotting to assassinate Hitler.

- For the attempted assassination of Hitler,

they decided they would try to insinuate

onto his aircraft some of these type C bombs

and it contains the explosive

which was a mixture of TNT and tetryl.

The purpose of this is to insert means of initiation

which in this case was intended to be a time pencil.

- [Narrator] The time pencil

is an acid-activated spring fuse.

When the copper end is crimped,

it breaks a vial of acid which slowly dissolves a wire

holding a high-tension spring.

When the spring is released,

it drives a firing pin into a detonator,

setting off an explosion.

(explosion booming)

Now, somebody had the bright idea

that if you take a pair of these, and I made some mock-ups

for the purpose and put them together,

they have very proximately the same dimensions

to a bottle of the French liquor Cointreau,

which was no doubt quite a luxury

in Germany during the war.

Quite like it myself.

- [Narrator] March 1943.

After visiting the Eastern Front,

Hitler prepares to fly back to Germany

and the conspirators make their move.

The detonator is inserted

and the entire package is wrapped

to look like two bottles of Cointreau.

(car engine rumbling)

At the airfield, one of the conspirators

presses the outside of the package,

breaking the vial of acid.

He hands it to one of Hitler's staff,

telling him it's a gift.

The bomb is set to explode in 30 minutes.

That afternoon, Hitler's plane takes off.

- Here we have a representation of the bomb.

Out of historic interest,

what I'm going to use is an equivalent amount of explosive.

This is just cartridges of standard plastic explosive,

the British military PE4.

Given a little more time,

I might've been able to arrange

a suitable plane to blow up,

but we're using this van,

which, after all, is well-constructed and in steel.

That's a pretty good equivalent to an airplane.

I'm now going to put the detonator into the explosive.

(tense menacing music)

Three, two, one.

(explosion booming)

(metal clattering)

Mm, well, that was a bit more than I had expected,

I must admit.

Seems to have reduced it

to its large sheet metal components.

There's the top.

It's inevitable that it would have blasted a hole

where I put the charge,

and imagine that that were an airplane.

There would be the floor of the airplane,

of the fuselage, flying through the air

pretty well by itself.

It could not conceivably remain aerodynamic.

(explosion booming)

The question arises, therefore, why didn't the bomb go off?

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Less than two hours after takeoff,

Hitler's plane arrived safely.

Some historians believe that a faulty detonator cap

or cold temperatures caused the bomb to malfunction,

but Sidney Alford has a new theory

about why the conspirator who packaged the bomb

missed his big chance at changing history.

- I rather suspect that he forgot,

I would guess, that that was a safety device

and you have to remove it before the thing could work.

He must have been in rather nervous condition

when he was getting ready this bomb to prepare Hitler.

The consequences of his being caught in the act

would've been horrendous for him.

If he had not made that mistake,

what the implications on history would've been,

Hitler dead in 1943.

Think about that.

(plane droning)

(explosion booming)

(pensive music)

- [Narrator] The vast collections

at the Natural History Museum hold mysteries from all eras

including savage tales from a dark time in British history

when wild animals fought to the death

for the entertainment of kings and princes.

(animal snarling)

(dramatic music)

(pensive music)

The Zoology Department at the Natural History Museum

houses one of the most extensive collections

of mammal skeletons in the world,

including a few specimens that reveal a story of violence,

(animal roars)

cruelty,

(animal roars)

and extinction.

(animal roars) (dog barks)

- These are two skulls that were excavated

from the moat of the Tower of London back in 1937.

They were actually examined by my predecessors

who made the identification

that these two specimens were actually lions.

(lion roaring)

The two skulls were found to be Barbary lion

and for the Natural History Museum, of course,

that was very, very exciting because up to that point,

we didn't have any identified specimens

of Barbary lion in the collection.

Now, the carbon date range that came back

for this one was late 13th, early 14th century.

They're the first two lion skulls to be discovered

in England since the end of the last ice age.

- [Narrator] But why were the bones

of the Moroccan lions found at the Tower of London?

There's a clue in other bones

that were found with them in the moat.

- But apart from the lions,

we have these wonderful examples here

of dog skulls found in the moat.

So this one in particular is of great interest to us

because you can actually see on the left-hand side

a puncture wound to the cranium.

What we assume has happened here

is that this specimen, this dog,

has been involved possibly in bear-baiting

and that this is a fatal canine puncture wound.

It speaks volumes, I think,

for what was going on in the Tower.

(lion roaring) (dog snarling)

(dramatic music) (choir vocalizing)

- [Narrator] The Tower of London

where English kings sent traitors to die

was infamous for torture and execution.

(crowd chattering faintly)

But there was another very different kind of cruelty

that took place here.

- This is the main western entrance to the Tower of London

and this is where the Royal Menagerie was

from the 13th century right up until the 19th century,

and here, lots of exotic animals were kept

and we can see the drawbridge

you would've crossed to come in.

You would've had to walk through a tower

which isn't there any longer.

(eerie music)

(lion snarling)

And you could imagine approaching this amazing,

very impressive, very threatening castle.

You've got the lions roaring at you.

Really is the royal presence, if you like.

(drum beating) (lion snarling)

There would've been a huge range

of animals in the menagerie.

(elephant trumpeting) There was an African elephant

which was a gift from the king of France.

The Hudson Bay Company give

the Tower of London a grizzly bear.

Initially, the animals are here really as status symbols

but by the 17th century, it's officially an area

that's being used for lion-baiting.

They've got dogs and bears

and different animal fighting, really,

that people are betting on.

The king, King James, is very keen on this

and has a special platform constructed

so it's kinda like an auditorium

and people can come and watch.

(crowd chattering faintly)

(lion snarling) (dog growling)

- [Narrator] In the 1930s,

hundreds of years after the Royal Menagerie had been closed,

archeologists made a startling discovery

in the Tower's moat.

- The lion skulls are extraordinary

because they have been dated to the medieval period

and they're also, as I understand it,

a breed of lion which is now extinct.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] But this breed of lion

may not be extinct after all

and the museum lion skulls could help prove it.

Conservationist Doctor Simon Black believes

the descendants of Barbary lions

may still be alive and well.

(lion roars)

And living in zoos around the world.

(drum beating)

- Here we have the Moroccan royal lions

which is the animals descended

from the royal palace collection of the king of Morocco.

One of the most notable features is this lovely mane

that goes round his head, round his body,

and down under his belly.

And then if you look at his eyes,

you've got very pale eyes

and this appears to be a characteristic of Barbary lions

and seems to be consistently found

in animals that are from the Moroccan king's collection.

We believe that since they've been kept in captivity,

it's offered us a chance, maybe,

to rediscover Barbary lion

or lions that at least have some of that ancestry,

and this is where these guys come in.

(brooding music)

- [Narrator] The plan is ambitious,

take DNA samples from lions across the planet

and compare them with the DNA of Moroccan royal lions.

- And when we compare the Moroccan royal lion

with a lion from Southern Africa,

we see that most of these pairs match up

but as we go through, we find areas such as here

where there is a mismatch.

And if we compare again with another set of lions,

this one from Ethiopia, again, going across,

a lot of commonality between all three lion populations

but then differences starting to appear

as we go across this small sequence.

So far with the few tools and data

that we do have available,

we are starting to find

that there are tantalizing differences

between the Moroccan royal lions

and lions from other populations.

- [Narrator] This suggests that they are a separate species

not related to other lions, but the question remains,

are they true descendants of the once majestic Barbary lion?

- There's a pool of data there

from the bones of those museum specimens

and it can tell us a little bit about this jigsaw of DNA,

what it looks like in Barbary lions,

and we can go back, check that DNA data,

and then match it with the Moroccan royal lion

and say, "Is there a good match?"

If these animals are shown to be authentic,

then effectively you are resurrecting an animal

that so far has been considered extinct

and we'd be showing evidence

that there's a subspecies of lion

which we haven't been able to talk about

for best part of 100 years.

(lion yawns)

- [Narrator] Research remains to be done.

But these 700-year-old skulls have brought scientists

one step closer to rediscovering a lost species

and a dream of one day returning

the Barbary lion to the wild.

There's another specimen at the Natural History Museum,

perhaps the best known of all extinct creatures,

holding clues that might help save

another species from extinction,

(tense music)

our own.

(dramatic music)

(pensive music)

Venture into the bird gallery of the Natural History Museum

and we find an incredible replica

of one of the most well-known birds in history, the dodo.

It's an animal famous for one thing, being extinct.

(gunshot booms) (bird squawks)

The dodo was obliterated with such speed

that the example still resonates today.

The expression dead as a dodo

evokes the grim concept of total annihilation

and the bird entered history

as one of Mother Nature's biggest losers,

a weak, lazy, fat failure.

But at the Natural History Museum,

they believe the poor dodo has been getting a bum wrap.

To finally set the record straight,

researchers at the museum are looking for answers

deep within the dodo's centuries-old bones.

(machine whirring)

- Well, this is a thin section.

It's a slice through the thigh bone of the dodo,

and it's been cut and ground down

to about 30 to 50 thousandths of a millimeter thick.

It's thin enough to let light go through it.

This area here in yellow is an area of bone fibers

that are running in a circular fashion

around the diameter of the bone,

and that is a characteristic of fast-growing bone

and this shows us that the dodo was able to grow

from a chick to an adult

without any interruptions in its growth.

So this does tell us something

about the ecology of Mauritius before humans arrived.

(relaxed percussive music)

- [Narrator] Mauritius is an isolated volcanic island

in the Indian Ocean and was the home of the dodo.

The bird's ancestors looked like large flying pigeons

and migrated to this small island millions of years ago,

finding plenty to eat and no predators, a dodo paradise.

Doctor Julian Hume is a world expert on the dodo.

For years, he's been trying to piece together

what life was like for this elusive bird.

(gentle music)

The myth that the dodo was an inadequate species

doomed to extinction, fat, vulnerable, is totally wrong.

(insects chirping) (bird squawks)

This bird was perfectly fine-tuned.

It wasn't this slow waddling thing

that wandered around its island home.

It was actually a very active species.

It actually took the equivalent of a large mammal,

so it became a cow, if you like, of the Mauritian forest.

It would've eaten the fruits on the ground

and everything about the bird's ecology evolved

to being on the ground,

and that's a key thing in why the dodo became flightless.

It's very expensive in terms of energy for a bird to fly,

and nature always works in a conservative way.

If you don't need those energy sources, get rid of them.

The breast muscles, the muscles that reduce flight,

are attached here to a bone called the sternum

and this usually has a big keel on it

on which those muscles were attached.

Well, the dodo didn't need them,

and so the keel has disappeared

and the muscles would've become very small.

And as you can see from the wings just here

how small those wings are compared

with the rest of the bird.

Being perfectly adapted to its Mauritian home,

there is a price to pay.

If it was left alone,

the dodos would still be happily walking around Mauritius

right to this present day.

(tense music)

(gunshot booms) (bird squawks)

- [Narrator] But in the 1600s,

European settlers arrived

and mistook the gentle spirit

and fearlessness of the flightless bird

for signs of stupidity.

They dubbed it dodo, meaning crazy or fool in Portuguese.

The label stuck.

(pigs snorting)

The Europeans also brought new animals to the island.

Rats, dogs, and pigs attacked the dodos and their nests,

feasting on the eggs.

The dodo had evolved in perfect harmony

with its forest home for millions of years.

Suddenly it was faced with all this onslaught

of introduced animals and it could not cope.

So after that first mention of dodos in 1599,

just 80 years later, it was gone from this world.

It was totally extinct.

And what can we learn from that?

Well, here we are as human beings on this planet

thinking we're above nature

and we are probably just as vulnerable in the long run

if dramatic changes take place on this planet

and we may well indeed follow the way of the dodo

if we're not careful.

(somber music)

(moves into pensive music)

- [Narrator] Every skeleton, every specimen,

every hidden space in the museum has a story to tell.

We've explored a few.

Many more remain, because the Natural History Museum is home

to millions of treasures.

Seeing behind the glass, taking a closer look,

we can discover other extraordinary museum secrets.

(smooth music)