"This is the Natural History Museum, South Kensington London, and about ten years ago I was a volunteer here over the summer." "My passion was insects, my job was to pin butterfly specimens into display cases." "For me, it was a weird, amazing place that changed the way that I look at the world forever." "Since I worked here, 30 million people have flocked through these doors to see one of the oldest and most important natural history collections on Earth." "But the displays are just the start of the story" " I'm joining a team who are going to spend the next year behind the scenes, and across the world revealing the museum's cutting-edge work that few have ever seen...until now." "There you go!" "And that's about 30,000 years old." "We're here to reveal the mysteries." "Oh, wow!" "The wonder, and the great discoveries taking place right now by the Natural History Museum, the museum of life." "The Natural History Museum has 17 million specimens, most of them hidden away behind the scenes." "I've got a test to get things going." "I want to see if they can find a single butterfly, the one I worked on whilst here for the summer ten years ago." "Right, so we're looking for Opsiphanes." "Blanca Huertas, curator of butterflies, is taking up the challenge." "You've butterfly earrings on, and you've a butterfly thing on your hair, you're mad on them!" "Yes, I am, I love butterflies." "We can start from here." "No, that's not it." "Perhaps..." "Bit of a treasure hunt this, isn't it?" "It is." "What have we got here?" "Right, that's close, isn't it?" "This is it, look at this." "Beautiful, yeah." "My own little piece of the Natural History Museum." "These great collections have given rise to some of the big ideas of the last two centuries, but today collecting still goes on, and it's still inspiring big ideas." "Mark Carwardine travelled to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, where one museum collector is currently at work." "'We now know that the greatest threat to the world's wildlife is habitat destruction." "'Beneath this modern day paradise lies a tragic story, the loss of an ecosystem 'that was once home to its most famous resident, the now extinct dodo." "'As a zoologist I was keen to meet museum scientist Julian Hume, 'who spent much of his life collecting here and uncovering the island's secrets.'" "Julian, it's amazing driving through mile after mile of these sugar cane plantations." "It's really hard to imagine what Mauritius might have been like at the time of the dodo." "Well, since the dodo's gone from this place, it's just changed beyond recognition, it's just unbelievable." "This was once covered in ebony forest, palm trees..." "What a sight that would have been, and now we're just left with this monoculture of sugar cane." "It's just dreadful to be honest." "The destruction of the ebony forests that once blanketed these lowlands began with the arrival of humans 400 years ago." "They hunted native animals to extinction and cut down the forests to make room for farmland." "As agriculture and tourism continue to grow, the depleted ebony forests are now only found in tiny pockets." "And so far attempts to revive them have failed." "Julian believes that the key to their conservation lies in the ancient history of the island." "What a wonderful place this is, Julian." "You're joking!" "This is just the pits to work in normally with the heat and mosquito's." "It's certainly hot, that's for sure." "It's under here that Julian discovered what remains of an ancient watering hole that was once surrounded by ebony." "This looks the most unlikely place imaginable." "It is not a pleasant place, but the rewards are high once you do get inside." "And out of this unlikely ditch his team has extracted over 7,500 bones." "Thanks to this little marsh, we've found a cross-section of the original ecology, so in other words we're starting to piece together the small bits as well as the large bits." "The large bits being dodo, giant tortoise, the large vertebrates, but we're finding little things, the seeds, the types of trees that were here, we're probably coming closest to working out what happened to these places before humans arrived from this one site." "Gosh, that's incredible." "As Julian built up a picture of the ancient habitat, time and time again it was one species he kept finding." "Not the dodo, but the giant tortoise." "And how many of these bones have you actually found?" "This is the extraordinary thing, in the excavations at the Mare aux Songes we found about 7,000 bones of which 95% are tortoises which meant they were in huge numbers there." "That some of number must have had a big impact on the ecology of Mauritius." "They must have been absolutely vital disperser for seeds, they would have eaten every fruit on the ground, walked away from the parent plant and disperse these seeds everywhere, so the plants must have suffered when these tortoises disappeared." "The extinct tortoise seems to be pivotal to the survival of the ebony forest and the ancient habitat of Mauritius." "And Julian's discovery has inspired one man to attempt what seems impossible, to re-build the lost land of the dodo." "Karl Jones is a renowned conservationist." "Karl is conducting an extraordinary experiment on a small island off the coast of Mauritius, to restore the ancient habitat simply by re-introducing giant tortoises." "Modern Aldabra tortoises from the Seychelles are taking the place of their extinct Mauritian counterparts." "If you've lost species from an ecosystem, they leave a gap, and a species isn't just a taxonomic unit, it actually fulfils an ecological role, and I thought," ""We should bring back species that could fulfil the same or similar roles to extinct species." "It's definitely going for the cameraman." "What was your biggest fear when you introduced the tortoises?" "The biggest fear was that they'd eat all the very rare plants, but, you know, deep down I realised that they wouldn't and we'd actually unveiled all sorts of interesting interactions between the tortoises and the plants." "Right from the start, the tortoises avoid eating saplings and stuck to the hardiest adult plants which can survive a few munched leaves." "Oh, the biggest of the bunch." "Be careful he doesn't bite you." "The Aldabra tortoises' natural instincts and the native vegetation worked in perfect harmony." "We've got some tortoises poo there that's decomposing, and out of it we've got lots of seeds of young ebonies." "Well, that's encouraging germination of the native plants." "What's interesting is, before we were seeing very little germination, and yet the tortoises spread the seeds around the island and they enhanced the germination." "Karl's experiment has paid off spectacularly." "It's working absolutely perfectly, and, you know, we always thought it would work, but we never thought it would work quite so well." "You must be relieved." "We're not only relieved, but we've actually now found the answer to managing a lot of the vegetation." "Without tortoises there's a whole suite of plants that would just become extinct." "What do you think of that, isn't that wonderful?" "It's gorgeous." "This is what it would have looked like when there were dodo's here." "The dodo may be gone, but the ebony forests that were once its home are fighting back." "This is absolutely spectacular." "And it's the museum's remarkable discoveries that provided part of the solution to saving this ancient paradise." "It took a vast collection of bones to inspire a project to slow down habitat destruction on Mauritius, and collections it seems underpin everything that happens in the Natural History Museum." "The museum's home to the largest and most important natural history collection in the world, and the specimens range from microscopic slides to huge whale skeletons." "Beyond what the public sees, somewhere in this labyrinth, this vast collection includes 58 million animals..." "..5 million pressed plants." "There are 9 million fossils... ..more than 300,000 rocks and minerals..." "..and over 2,000 meteorites." "But while all of the tens of millions of items in the collection are precious to someone, one stands head and shoulders above the rest." "Arrive at the museum by the main entrance and you will be welcomed by the same buck-tooth grin that has enchanted visitors for decades." "Diplodocus, or Dippy to his friends, has pride of place in the main hall." "Today, he's one of the museum's most loved and iconic exhibits." "Even if he is a bit tricky to photograph." "Dippy has become synonymous with the museum as it's such a gargantuan exhibit, and it's the first thing that people see when they enter the museum, and it's often the last thing when they leave, so it makes a lasting impression." "But while he may leave visitors awestruck, many people fail to realise Dippy is not a real fossil." "In fact, he's a plaster replica." "He's modelled not on one, but five incomplete skeletons housed in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in the US." "His unveiling in 1905 was a sensation, introducing Edwardian Britain to dinosaurs for the very first time." "It was actually the first complete Sauropod dinosaur to be mounted anywhere in the world, so this was a world first, and there are headlines saying "Welcome colossal stranger"." "And in his 100 years at the museum, the irrepressible dinosaur has refused to stand still." "As scientific knowledge has changed, so has Dippy." "When Diplodocus arrived at the museum his head was close to the floor and his tail dragged along the ground, reflecting the fact that he was thought to be a swamp-dwelling, almost aquatic animal." "Nowadays we know that Diplodocus walked on solid ground and actually fed from the tops of trees, and as a result of that we've changed the mount so that his head sticks proudly above the floor, showing it would have been something like a gigantic reptilian giraffe" "and the tail is sticking out from behind the back of the body, and we may make different changes in the future depending how scientific progress effects our views." "But 100 years of wowing museum visitors takes its toll on even the mightiest dinosaur." "Once a year specialist cleaners arrive ready to tackle the accumulated layers of dust and grime." "With each of its 292 fragile bones to dust and clean, the work continues late into the night." "As a dinosaur worker it's really nice to see a dinosaur occupying this central position in the museum." "Some of my colleagues might be a bit annoyed that this is happening, but if they have something else that's 26m long that they want to put in its place, I'm open to discussion." "Ten years after working here, exploring the museum is like re-acquainting myself with an old friend." "One thing I do remember, beyond the public displays is really where the museum begins." "Although the iconic building dates from 1881, each generation since has added to it, as the growing collections needed more space to expand." "The result is a confusing five-mile labyrinth of corridors." "Though much of this is everything you'd expect from a 21st century museum, there are still secret corners where time has stood still." "BUZZING" "Professor Richard Fortey is a leading palaeontologist and a self-styled explorer of the old museum." "He started working here in 1970 and though now technically retired, he's still frequently to be found at his desk." "Hi, there." "Hello." "I'm Jim, nice to meet you." "Hi, Jim." "So how many acres does the museum cover?" "Oh, goodness, I think it's more than three acres." "That's big, isn't it?" "And the whole place is a bit like Hogwarts." "When I first joined here there was one office you could only reach by climbing a ladder over the roof." "And I mean your passion for discovering... the secret rooms and hallways in the museum, when did that start?" "More or less from day one because you know if you do experiments with rats, if you put a rat in a new site, what they always do is make themselves at home, then they do little forays outwards and return to the home base, so I was rather like that." "So here we are in the basement." "So we're down in the bowels of the..." "Down in the...underneath all of the exhibition areas in the bowels." "So this would be an old-style curate, you could say it's a typical office." "So this would be the type of office you'd have found yourself in when..." "The point is, I was then married with my collection, the collections were in the same office." "Right, well, it sort of made sense." "And then we all had including me, a balcony so you could "wherefore art thou, Romeo" kind of situation." "Hanging on the balcony." "Giant clams looking..." "Oh, yeah, I should show you this one as we pass, molluscs have always put their... odd bits of sort of molluscarama into this cupboard." "Look at it, it's like a load of old chintz." "BEEPING And this leads to a great staircase?" "Well, it leads to one of the lavatory lanes." "Lavatory lane..." "Tucked away here, this is one of our experts on snails." "THE expert on snails I should say." "The professor is taking me to see the last of the old-style store rooms." "For him, this is the heart of the museum." "No, this isn't right." "I'm lost." "Is it back down here?" "It's not this one." "'But even he is having problems tracking it down.'" "This looks like more boxes." "This must be it here then." "It's the old dry storeroom number one, as we used to call it." "Dry storeroom number one is a treasure trove, items long since removed from display that may still prove invaluable for scientific study." "But for Richard it's a room filled with intriguing objects that fire the imagination at every turn." "Tortoises, turtles, terrapins..." "So it's skulls, dried skins, what else have we...?" "Look at these guys." "Yeah, famous old giant tortoise specimens." "This is for me quite a nostalgic trip because this was one of the places I discovered when I explored the museum." "So when you first came here..." "As a youth!" "..was it your lunch break and you thought, "I'll nip off with the key..."?" "We didn't really have anybody keeping tabs on us, you know, if you thought you'd go for a bit of a wonder in the afternoon, nobody came and ticked you off." "What did you think when you opened the door and you saw all of this?" "Well, I was completely amazed." "Of course the golden rule, at least to my view is, as we've seen, is you don't throw anything away because you never know whether a new technique will come into existence which may find scientific use." "'Perhaps that's the essence of a great collection, you don't throw anything away.'" "It used to take 25 minutes to get from one end of the building to the other." "You've just opened a door and all of a sudden we're back in the museum." "Yeah, the bit that everybody knows." "So this is the "other world"." "Not throwing things away does however mean that the collection is forever getting larger, so much so that these days the walls of the museum can no longer contain it." "Far from the busy museum, there's another place whose location is a secret." "But those who do have access appreciate the value of the generations of people who've resisted the urge to throw things away." "I'm Richard Sabin, Curator of Mammals in the Dept of Zoology." "My first reaction to the collections was just awe." "We have around about 860,000 specimens in the mammal collection." "The thing that really did make me stop and catch my breath is an animal in this collection that I'd seen as a child at the London Zoo, and that's Guy the Gorilla." "I remember pulling back a curtain and there was Guy." "I recognised him straightaway." "As a child, I was actually interested in bones," "I wanted to know why they were there, what they did, and I had very tolerant parents who let me bring back the occasional dead animal that I'd find beside the road, they gave me a patch of ground in the garden to bury these things, and I'd leave them... for week and months, dig them up, take a look at the bones," "and started to build-up a little reference collection." "Bones for me are interesting because they tell you the story of the animal's life, they give you an insight into the behaviour of the animals." "There are always going to be those times when you open a cabinet and you're faced with something for the first time and it just completely stops you." "I found a crate in the storeroom which was completely unlabelled, no information with it at all, just one small note - "this is the inflated dried heart of a young sperm whale."" "It's just the most superb thing." "It's a privilege to be the custodian, to be responsible for this material, but the greatest pleasure for me is to see these old collections, these older parts of the collections still being used in a contemporary and relevant way." "There's a whole raft of technology that's been developed which means more and more genetic information can be extracted from older and older specimens, so there's sort of renaissance for collections like these now with the developments in new techniques and scientific analysis." "While some items can spend years hidden away behind the scenes, there are others that are always in demand." "A few however are so famous and so globally important that having one just isn't enough." "One item owned by the Natural History Museum is constantly sought-after, not just by scientists in the museum, but by scientists all over the world." "Oh, it's heavy." "It is, it's quite heavy." "'As an engineer, I'm fascinated by problem solving, 'and Lorraine Cornish, conservator of fossils and bones, has a bigger problem than most.' Lovely." "We're going to take the lid off, all right?" "'She has to make a mould of archaeopteryx, the fragile 150 million year old fossil 'thought to link birds and dinosaurs, and among the most valuable specimens in the museum." "'It's going to be a risky three-week job that will involve 'smothering the specimen in liquid rubber.'" "The problem is, when you cover this with a liquid, the rubber, you don't want the rubber going down those cracks, cos it'll be difficult to... ..peel back out." "Yes, and you don't want to hurt the specimen, so we have to make sure that everywhere is going to be protected, so when we put that rubber on, we won't damage the specimen when we peel it off." "Am I going to help?" "You are going to help me with this, if that's what you'd like to do." "A little bit nervous, keep an eye on me." "'We must secure every part of the fossil with a special wax 'if we're to prevent the rubber mould from pulling this priceless specimen apart.'" "This wishbone is like the most fragile part of the specimen." "There is no matrix underneath at all, and it's paper thin, absolutely paper thin, so if anything is going to give on this, it's going to be that, so I have to carefully put some of the wax underneath to protect it, as we don't want the rubber going." "What'd happen if we didn't do this?" "When you pull the mould up, it would come away in pieces, and you'd never be able to put it back again properly, it would never be the same." "I'll keep away then." "You keep away from it!" "You'll be fine, Kate." "Can you see my hands...?" "'Recent conservation work on archaeopteryx 'removed stone from the edges of this slab, so the museum's current mould is out of date.'" "Last year, I actually changed the look of this specimen, and every time we do that we want to make a permanent record of that." "'The new mould will also be used to make replicas of archaeopteryx 'so that natural history museums around the world can have their own copy of this special fossil." "'Archaeopteryx has been highly prized since the day it was discovered in a German quarry back in 1861." "'I went to find out why a few weeks ago when I met up with dinosaur expert Angela Milner.'" "Archaeopteryx is an example of evolution really caught in the act, it's half way between a small, meat-eating dinosaur and a bird." "The features that tell us that it's a bird are these beautiful impressions of feathers." "These are preserved in very fine grained limestone so all the detail is there." "You can see one hind leg here, a beautifully preserved foot..." "Oh, it's got claws." "But one of the claws is actually turned round through 90 degrees so it's got a perching claw like modern birds have..." "Oh, yes." "But it's got a long bony tail like a dinosaur." "And lastly a very key character in the front of the skull which is preserved on the other half of the slab here, you can see little tiny teeth in the front of the jaws, and those teeth are the same as you find in small meat-eating dinosaurs," "so it's a marvellous mosaic of characters between a dinosaur and a bird." "Archaeopteryx is proof of evolution, and reveals that birds originated from dinosaurs." "Although nine other fossils of archaeopteryx have since been discovered, it is this one that remains the most important." "This particular specimen is THE original specimen that was found, it's the one that bears the name "archaeopteryx lithographica", so it's what we call the type specimen, so it is the ultimate reference specimen." "Oh, my goodness." "So if anything happened to it, if it got damaged, what would the consequences be?" "If anything was damaged, we would lose scientific information forever." "Which makes our task of making a mould of archaeopteryx all the more daunting." "It's time for the liquid rubber." "You're going to help me put this all over the specimen." "It just doesn't feel right, we have got this incredibly valuable, beyond value specimen, and we're just going to cover it with stuff." "I know, I know." "What we're going to do is work on the bone section, so you get some on your brush, I'll just do the top to show you, and all you're doing, you're not even pushing," "you're gently allowing the rubber to go on, then you can leave it like that." "You are so calm about this." "Work down the tail, and then work your way out to the tail feathers." "Do you ever get nervous doing this?" "Not at this stage actually," "I have control at this stage, there's a level of uncertainty comes when I peel away the mould, cos although I think I might be 100% sure that I've made every possible step to avoid any damage," "I won't know until I pull that mould off that I'm right." "I find this so weird, it feels like complete sacrilege." "Does look quite shocking, doesn't it?" "It's like, "What are they doing to the specimen?"" "My instincts are telling me I should not be doing this, but I've got to trust Lorraine." "The night before we peel the mould off," "I may not sleep quite as comfortably as I would on other nights." "And the next bit of the recipe is..." "Leave to set for 24 hours, and then store in a cool secret place." "Well, I'm back for the next instalment, and this is the really nerve-wracking bit." "I just want to get on with it." "Over the last week, more layers of rubber were added to the mould, now it's time to see if we can get archaeopteryx safely out from under it." "It's possible to damage the specimen if you don't do this bit properly." "If you start to pull..." "There we go." "Oh, wow!" "It's coming away really cleanly." "Yeah." "'But it's the fragile wishbone that's particularly vulnerable.'" "You're past it, you're past the wishbone." "Perfect, perfect." "Wow!" "Voila!" "There we are." "Phew!" "Isn't that amazing?" "Look at that tail, it's fabulous, isn't it?" "That's the bit I did." "It's really..." "Look at the detail, the detail is brilliant, everything's fine, isn't it?" "And the specimen itself..." "The specimen is happy." "I feel I need a drink after that." "Well, this is the main thing, this specimen is perfectly intact." "'The worst is over." "'With the new mould, Lorraine can make copies of archaeopteryx for any museum in the world." "'Another week, and the first replica is ready.'" "It's like an old familiar friend." "The resin is so good you can still see all the tail impressions, can't you?" "The texture's brilliant." "The feathers..." "Exactly, and all of the...bone, even the little cracks in the bone you can see, so the next challenge is to paint it." "After 20 hours of artwork, our new cast reflects almost every detail of the original." "And its new home is in the museum's very own Earth galleries, where it replaces the old cast." "From here, archaeopteryx will continue to share its unique story of evolution." "'Today, evolution is perhaps the biggest story told by The Natural History Museum." "'Its importance is recognised symbolically by the positioning of a statue overlooking the central hall." "'Charles Darwin, 'the man who unravelled the workings of evolution following his famous five-year voyage on The Beagle." "'In the recent past, this prime position in the museum was held 'by the statue of the museum's founder, Richard Owen." "'Owen and Darwin spent years at loggerheads with opposing variations on evolutionary theory.'" "When Darwin published The Origin Of Species, Owen called it an abuse of science." "Darwin wrote to a friend saying," ""it is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me,"" "and some years later Owen lobbied against the extension of Kew Gardens, this prompted Darwin to write," ""I used to be ashamed of hating him so much," ""but now I will carefully cherish my hatred and contempt to the last of my days."" "To mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin Of Species, it was decided that Darwin would take pride of place, and Owen would have to move aside." "Moving the two giants of natural history was a feat in itself, but like the men in life it seems the statues are destined to take turns in the limelight and remain at a safe distance from each other." "For the time being, at least, Darwin has the best seat in the house," "Owen is relegated to a dark corner on an upper floor." "It seems somehow symbolic, the man who conceived the building as a temple to God's creatures, has given way to a champion of a godless evolution." "This is a first edition." "Today, Darwin has achieved an almost mythic status." "Original copies of The Origin Of Species are handled with extreme reverence, whilst specimens he collected are treated almost as relics." "Sometimes, however, something collected by Darwin achieves a status beyond what it deserves as zoology curators found when the story of one of his bird collections was pieced together." "These are Darwin's finches." "They were collected on his great voyage of discovery on The Beagle in the 1830s." "They're often cited as the spark for Darwin's big idea, his theory of evolution." "Variations in the finches' beak shape and size demonstrate how they'd evolved to take advantage of food available in their particular habitat." "The misconception is that the finches provided Darwin with this great eureka moment in the Galapagos." "He arrived, he sees little finches on the beach, he sees different beaks and thinks, "Species change, it's evolution."" "They are really important as an example of what Darwin was trying to explain, but they weren't that for Darwin." "The museum does however hold a set of bird skins that had largely been overlooked by the history books." "Darwin's mockingbirds." "Darwin collected a number of them from the South American mainland." "When the expedition moved onto the Galapagos archipelago," "Darwin found mocking birds on several of the islands." "In the Galapagos when he arrived he collected this bird here." "On the second island he visited he collected this one here, the Floreana Mockingbird, and it was the differences between these two birds that got him starting thinking." "Now, the reason he could think about these two birds and notice the difference is because of these ones." "The mainland birds collected by Darwin show very little variation." "What surprised him about the Galapagos mockingbirds was not only their difference to those from the mainland, but how they varied from island to island." "If you see there, its kind of blank pale chest, there's nothing going on there, and this one here has got this dark, dark chest band." "The birds are a bit difference in size, and there's some differences in beak shapes." "It was different enough for him to think, "That's extraordinary, that's greater than any of the differences" ""I've seen across the continent of South America,"" "and he wrote in his notes that, you know, these differences might mean that species change." "So we know it was the mockingbirds that helped him and not the finches." "The variation in mockingbirds isolated from each other led Darwin to question the stability of species, an idea that would eventually lead him to his theory of evolution by natural selection." "For me, it's really important to reinstate the mockingbirds in their rightful position as Darwin's key bird inspiration." "We can understand Darwin better by looking at the mockingbirds and knowing these are the key ones and not the finches." "One of the less well-known facts about Darwin is that he was fascinated by worms." "He suspected they were central to soil fertility, and spent many hours making strange sounds and playing music to see what would bring them closer to the surface, and today his work continues, and there are many people still singing into the soil in the name of science." "# Lah la lah la lah la... #" "Yes, I know it looks like we've all lost our marbles, but this is actually the museum's latest venture." "That noble institution The Natural History Museum has taken up worm charming." "Go and grab it." "Yes, you heard right, we're literally trying to charm the worms out of the ground." "SHE WHISTLES" "Apparently there is method in this madness and I want to find out what's behind it." "200 years after Charles Darwin first started worm charming," "I'm meeting Emma Sherlock, the museum's own earthworm expert." "So just start pouring the mustard quite liberally, and then we just..." "And what does the mustard do?" "Basically, this goes down into the worm's burrows, and just like irritates them a little bit, it's not too bad for them, it won't do them any long-lasting harm, but it just slightly annoys them so they come to the surface to get away, and then we can pick them up." "C'mon, worms." "The mustard method is apparently the gold standard in worm charming." "It's a waiting game, isn't it?" "Definitely." "Emma needs to study the worms she finds because, unbelievably, we still know very little about the creatures chiefly responsible for the health of the soil." "Oh, I can see one here, look." "Oh, wow." "That's a good one." "But the mustard method only targets deep burrowing worms, and with over 26 species of earthworm in Britain," "Emma needs other methods that will reach the places mustard can't, so she's on the hunt for other techniques." "Which is why we're off to Hyde Park for an unusual event." "Hello, welcome to the launch of the Earthworm Society of Britain." "Today, Emma plans to make worm charmers out of all of us." "Is there any particular method that you want to try, or should I assign you one at random?" "Assign at random." "Are you any good at singing?" "I like to call myself a charmer, this is the ghillie..." "I'm the ghillie, the one that picks the worms out of the ground." "Some of the punters take their worm charming very seriously." "I went to the World Worm charming Championship this June and, unfortunately, I only got six worms." "Emma is harnessing our competitive spirit to help her run an experiment." "What we're trying to do is have a look to see what is the best method of worm charming because there are lots of methods, it's become a national sport, everyone is trying different ways of charming the worms out" "and we want to know what's the best one, cos it could be useful to us." "What are the four different methods that you're using?" "Today we're going to do fork twanging." "You take your fork, you twang it and you wait for worms." "We're going to do grunting." "No, not like a pig." "You rub two sticks together and create vibrations in the ground." "Then we've got a good bit of old stamping." "Yep, I think I've got the hang of that one." "And then we've got the alternative." "# Lah la lah la lah la lah... #" "Remember, it was good enough for Darwin." "OK, once you find the best method, what are you going to do with that?" "Then we will actually take that forward and start testing that with our other methods we use in the field, and we may well incorporate that in the future into our sampling protocols." "OK." "so we'll be really interested to know what happens here today." "Hello!" "'OK, time for me to blend in.'" "I'd like to be a grunter's ghillie if that's possible." "A grunter's ghillie, OK." "Can I ask you to assume your squares, please?" "Three, two, one - go!" "And we're off." "We have 20 minutes to woo the worms." "It's an enthusiastic start from the alternatives, the grunters are working up a sweat... ..and the twangers claim their first worm, a stamper breaks through, whilst the alternatives bring up the rear." "'At last, the grunters get a worm.' Found one, found one!" "But the alternatives are going to ground, nothing is happening there." "BELLS RING" "Stop!" "I didn't get a worm!" "Somebody with a twanging method got about six worms, this is all we got." "Still, you know, not too shabby." "Number 236..." "Got six." "31. 31." "While three of the methods got six worms between them, fork twanging took in 138 worms." "Emma, it was a bit of a no contest today, wasn't it, really?" "Yeah, well, I thought the fork twanging was going to win, but I hadn't realised it was going to be such an outright winner." "Well, there's only one more job for us to do, release them back into the wild." "Bye, little wormies." "For any scientist in the museum the great hope is that some day the routine task of gathering specimens will throw up new things to science, and to the greatest accolade of all, naming them." "My name is Sandy Knapp and I'm a plant taxonomist." "I figure out what species are and I describe new species and I also look at the evolutionary relationships amongst those species." "If you think about variation, human beings are variable, each of us looks quite different, but we're still all the same species, that's the same kind of thing we do." "My particular specialty is the Solanaceae, things like potatoes, tomatoes, petunias, tobacco, and so it's one of those families that's really used a lot by people, and to me that gives it that human dimension which makes it fun for me." "Some of the describing of a new species is trying to figure out what you're going to call it, so I'm describing a new species from Peru which I'm going to call after a man who's helped loads of us" "who've collected in Peru called Don Isidoro Sanchez Vega, and it's going to be called Solanum Sanchez-vegae." "This is the one I've designated as the type specimen, which means if someone comes along in a 100 years and decides I was mad to describe this as a new species, they look at that type and see if it corresponds with what they have a different species concept of." "The only reason we give names to things is to be able to talk about them." "Imagine what life would be like if we didn't have names." "And we had to describe each other every time I wanted to gossip about someone to someone else." "I would have to describe them physically, imagine how slow a conversation would be then." "I've been sent a bunch of plants which were collected on a series of expeditions in the Zhuang region of Yunnan in China." "They've sent them to me and asked me if I would identify them for them, and one of the first things I do when I do this is I sort them into piles to allow me to say all of these are the same and these are the same." "So this one looks a bit like this one, but when you look at it with the hand lens, this one has different hairs on the flowers." "Taxonomy the way I do it is essentially pattern recognition, and in that way, children are naturally taxonomists." "My boys used to sort the plastic animals into prehistoric animals and modern animals, and then they would have battles and things." "But it's a fantastic thing to be able to do," "Basically you just get to be someone who never really grew up." "I feel uniquely lucky that I've discovered something that I absolutely love, and that I come into work every day and think "oh, what do I get to do today?"" "Which is, which is great." "It's incredible." "There are huge numbers of people here, and it's not to see a new exhibit, a dinosaur or a giant panda or anything like that, it's one of the great icons of wildlife film making, Sir David Attenborough." "Sir David Attenborough has spent a lifetime working with natural history institutions the world over." "I wanted to ask what the Natural History Museum means to him as an expert, and an outsider." "Now when I was growing up, I remember my first experience of the museum, my father brought me here when I was about five." "I remember seeing the big blue whale." "Is there anything that you remember, your first visit to the museum." "I mean, the front doors are a pretty impressive start, you're into somewhere special." "Yeah." "And then you go through and you saw that dinosaur, erm, I..." "When I fist visited I was very impressed, my second visit, I have to say," "I was a bit disappointed to discover that the dinosaur wasn't a real dinosaur, it was a plaster cast of a dinosaur." "And that was a bit of a letdown." "But I soon discovered that actually, of course, there's much more to natural history than dinosaurs." "When you come to the museum, do you still get that same sense of excitement as you did as a child?" "I don't think it's the same because, you know, you don't feel as a child when you're in your 80's, but I certainly get a kick." "I mean, this is one of the great places, you know, of natural history and the biological sciences, it's one of the focuses in the world, this is where so many advances were made," "this is where so many discoveries were made." "This is where so many hugely important specimens are stored." "So this museum houses some famous collections and great collectors of the time as well, like Wallis and Darwin, have their specimens here." "This collection, I mean, does it still have a relevance today?" "Oh, yeah, because if you want to know whether an animal you caught is X, Y, Z, which was what it was originally called, you discover that Darwin actually gave it that name, and you go and find there it is in a drawer or a bottle, you know," "so you actually then count how many gill bars it has, or how many scales it has, and so you can say, yes, it is, or you can say, no, it's a new species." "But that's what you have to do, so that is very, very relevant." "When people look at the specimens, they see the museum and the open galleries." "Do you think they think about all the work that goes on behind the scenes?" "Well, some will and some won't." "And it isn't a catastrophe if you come through this museum and you don't realise what work is done at the back, if you have been to very important place and seen some remarkable things and discovered something about the glory and fascination of the natural world." "But you get more if you begin to realise that this is where so much of this work goes on." "Towards the end of last year, the museum announced the opening of a new wing." "A 78 million pound extension of exhibition space and laboratories." "But I can't help wondering, how much of the work that goes on in these 21st century ivory towers will ever mean anything out there in the real world." "As a Doctor of tropical medicine, I regularly see first-hand the effects of one particular deadly creature." "Its bite kills two million people a year, and it's name comes from the Spanish word meaning "small fly"." "We know it as a mosquito, and I'm looking for one in particular, the anopheles, the carrier of the deadly parasite that causes malaria." "And surprisingly, I'm not deep in a tropical jungle, I'm pond-dipping in Kent." "Hi, Chris." "Hello." "Yvonne Linton is an entomologist and biomedical researcher from the museum." "Be careful on the way down." "She's about to show me that the anopheles are not only here, they're thriving right under our noses." "That's not a Mosquito, I did see it, it's a beetle." "I'm getting a bit paranoid." "And I have reason to be paranoid." "Although malaria was successfully eradicated from the UK in the 1950s, since then, no proper studies have been carried out." "Yvonne's work is changing that, and it starts with a study of the larvae." "They're a bit evasive, so they will fly down as soon as they feel the surface of the water break." "Have you got any, I don't seem to be finding any." "Not finding them?" "You might be dipping just a bit too deep." "I'm absolutely rubbish at this, extraordinary, I wasn't expecting to be bad at it..." "What's that?" "That's an anopheles, hurray, the first one." "Look at that, brilliant, and is that another one?" "Yeah, well done, you, where did you find them?" "I've probably thrown loads away, it was when you said they looked like little pieces of grass and then..." "I thought it was a piece of grass, that's brilliant." "That's the malarial mosquito." "This is the evidence that the anopheles are here." "We're going to have to scale this gate." "We're climbing over this?" "So Yvonne now needs to find the adult females." "The very mosquitoes that carry malaria." "So she's taking me to some World War II bunkers which apparently are an ideal hunting site." "As we come through here, you'll see some mosquitoes lurking in here." "Yep, absolutely..." "Directly above you here..." "And here..." "Here's one..." "There he is." "There she is." "She is." "The female anopheles mosquito, gorged on blood." "That's the female here, and then here is the male." "In the 1950s, an eradication programme successfully reduced the numbers of UK mosquitoes, and wiped out malaria parasites from the UK." "But today populations of the anopheles have bounced back, and there are reports that they're becoming re-infected with malaria, carried into the country by the increasing number of travellers returning from the tropics." "So it's one of these mosquitoes, biting someone who's just got off a plane at..." "Gatwick, I suppose, is quite nearby." "Yeah." "And then carrying malarial parasites from that traveller to..." "I think the case I read about was an old lady in a nursing home who'd never left Britain." "Who never left the UK, that does happen." "And suddenly gets a fever, very hard to diagnose because you never think of malaria." "Well, they're very much finer, the anopheles mosquitoes, they look more ladylike in a way, and when they're resting on a wall, they're at 45-degree angle, so all the other mosquitoes, they're all flat against the wall," "so it's very easy if you're in your hotel room and you see a mosquito on the wall." "If it's resting at this angle, then you should deal with it before you fall asleep." "If it's resting at the other, you might get a bite, but you won't end up with malaria." "I'm not sentimental about mosquitoes." "Normally, I'm happy to kill them, but Yvonne wants me to catch them alive!" "So this is our very high-tech equipment, and this is called a puter." "I was expecting some fancy machine like a vacuum with a..." "Well, that's why I brought you, this is the end you suck with." "And a piece of my mum's net curtain." "To stop you actually sucking up and inhaling the mosquito." "And you shouldn't get too many cobwebs and things either." "So what you need to do is find your beast, here's one, start sucking." "I hope Mrs Linton's net curtains are up to the job." "Put you finger over it." "Mmm." "Did you get it?" "Mm-huh." "Look at that, brilliant, this is great, first mosquito that I've ever caught alive." "It's like the worst camping trip ever, isn't it?" "These adults will be ground up so their DNA can be extracted." "Yeah, this feels a lot like payback." "I've been bitten by a lot of mosquitoes in various places, and it's really nice to know they're going to grind all these up." "That will tell Yvonne which species are here." "Must be thousands in here." "And how many of these mosquitoes are potential carriers of malaria." "I wasn't expecting to spend the day surrounded by mosquitoes, knee-deep in sheep droppings." "I couldn't see them in the tunnel, that's ridiculous." "That's great!" "It's true that in the UK there hasn't been many studies on mosquitoes over the last 50 years, because we thought that we'd done our job." "We need to know our enemy, so we know how to control it and minimise the risk to all of us here in the UK." "I had heard that Yvonne's work doesn't stop at the borders of the UK, so I went to see her in her state of the art laboratory to find out how world changing her studies could prove to be." "How much of a problem is malaria in this day and age around the world?" "It's still a massive problem." "It's the third biggest killer in the world after heart disease and cancer." "We're talking about 1.3 million deaths every year." "Yvonne now believes that her project can reduce the impact of malaria worldwide." "The work you're doing here right now, we're crushing up these little mosquitoes, which I've got to say is quite satisfying, isn't it?" "Absolutely!" "But the work you're doing here could change the lives of millions of people around the world." "That's really what we're aiming at, actually the ultimate product of this huge global initiative is actually a hand-held DNA, what we call a DNA bar-coder." "People that were actually doing the spraying in the fields would be able to look there and see if there was any mosquito larvae, be able to squash that mosquito onto a plate and they would get an ID." "We'd be able to know with a single mosquito, which species it is and is it transmitting in this particular area at this particular time." "People on the ground could assess whether they need to spray or not because if it's present or it isn't, then this little gizmo would help do that?" "Absolutely." "I've been looking forward to coming back to the museum, but I'll be honest, I was a little worried about what I might find." "I wasn't sure if it'd feel obscure, dusty, as if looking back to a golden era of discovery." "But in fact, I've found an institution aware of its own history, but squarely facing the problems of a very modern world." "It's funny, this place has changed even since I was a volunteer here ten years ago." "It's brighter and it's more outward looking." "To me, these collections make up a toolbox for the world, a toolbox with 70 million items inside." "Founded 130 years ago as a museum in the classical sense of the word, it was a place to muse, to think, and even change the world, it is today what it set out to be..." "The Natural History Museum, the museum of life." "Next time, we're unearthing a new dinosaur in South Africa." "Seems to be, if you like, caught in the act." "Unravelling the personality of a T-Rex, and meeting one of our ancestors." "It was a bombshell, because nothing else had turned up from Africa like it." "We're encountering some of the most mysterious and intriguing items in the museum, as we enter the world of fossils and bones." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"