"Welcome to the Natural History Museum." "Hardly a day passes without reports in the press of scientists making predictions." "Whether it's about our health or the state of the planet." "Across this series we've seen how objects are being used to create a picture of times past." "But this time, the team's heading to all parts of the museum and beyond." "Trick is not to let it run off." "To see how scientists are making predictions about what lies ahead for the museum..." "That is amazing." "..and for all of us." "The future of humanity will be in their hands." "For this last programme in the series we're off to meet the people who're looking into the future, right here in the Natural History Museum - the Museum of Life." "The Natural History Museum has a collection of 70 million items." "It's a powerful resource." "But before I can explore how it might be used in the future," "I'm interested to find out if it even HAS a future." "Until recently, no-one knew for sure if this collection would last for decades, centuries or indefinitely, but Max Barkley, beetle curator, discovered a clue." "And this is the specimen we're particularly interested in, let's get the light onto that." "Wow, so what's so important about this, then?" "Well, this piece of wood was dug up by a farmer in a field in East Anglia." "They were cutting this up for firewood and they found that it had these holes in it, these tunnels and inside some of the tunnels there were beetles." "That's curious because neither of the farmers had ever seen beetles like this and they had the presence of mind to send them to the Natural History Museum to be identified." "My counterparts in those days were surprised because this species is not found in the UK at all any more, it's a southern European species, so they had the piece of wood dated, and the extraordinary thing is" "that this piece of wood is more or less contemporaneous with the building of the pyramids." "You're joking." "So this is... 4,000 plus years that this has been lying submerged in a peat bog." "So for 4,000 years these beetles have been trapped inside preserved..." "Yeah, exactly." "What would have happened is, the larvae who would be feeding on the wood and it would make a cell like this to hide in for the winter." "And when the spring comes it was going to emerge as a beetle and fly off into the bronze-aged spring, but something happened and the tree was buried." "And the beetles would have drowned in their cells and just have survived there until these chaps dug it up when they were planting their potatoes." "These insects would be preserved for 4,000 years, and in really good condition so..." "Well, they look exactly like modern specimens." "If you saw that in your double glazing you'd just think it had crawled in and died." "Yeah, you would, wouldn't you!" "So in terms of the collection now, what does that have to offer the collection in terms of.." "Well, it tells me that, if I can preserve the specimens correctly, they're going to last a great deal longer than I am." "So if these collections are going to be around for a long time, how might they be used in the years and decades to come?" "Chris van Tulleken has come to see how scientists are turning to some very old specimens to see the future." "I'm in the Museum's beetle collection, which has over eight million specimens." "Now originally they were collected for biological research, but today, along with many of the other specimens here, they're finding another use - they're providing inspiration for the technologies of the future." "Each of these specimens is an extraordinary piece of engineering." "Evolved over millions of years, these animals have adapted perfectly to the environments in which they live." "Evolutionary biologist Andrew Parker is looking to copy some of these designs, and adapt them for modern technological purposes." "Known as biomimetics, it's a new science with almost unlimited potential." "All these specimens have been collected already for us to start working on." "All these different adaptations that have evolved in various environments that are just ripe for exploitation." "You've got a team of people trawling through these collections, stealing nature's ideas." "Absolutely, yeah, yeah." "Shamelessly." "Oh, absolutely we're totally robbing nature of all its good ideas." "Andrew's interest is colour, in particular how beetles and butterflies produce these vivid metallic effects." "What's surprising here is that, unlike the colours in your clothes or the paint on your car, these colours are not produced by chemical pigments, but by a physical structure." "A prism divides white light into the colours of the rainbow." "This is structural colour." "As colours as produced entirely by a physical structure, no pigment is necessary." "The exoskeleton of some beetles and the wings of some butterflies work in a similar way." "They use microscopic physical structures to produce colour that will never fade." "The stuff it's made from has no actual colour, it's just the shapes are reflecting particular wavelengths at particular angles, so that's the colour my eyes see, is that right?" "That's right, absolutely, it's almost like glass, the material, it's totally transparent." "What makes structural colour so interesting is that it's permanent." "Whereas dyes and pigments fade over time, as long as the structure remains intact, so does the colour." "So how old are some of these beetles?" "Well, some of these are actually over 100 old, and you can see..." "Not the shiny ones?" "Yes, absolutely, they still look as fresh as they did when they did when they were alive." "Really?" "Yeah, really amazing." "So how would that be useful?" "We can now make paints that use these types of metallic colours, you can produce any colour you want, for example a red car, and the car wouldn't fade over time, whereas red cars, today, become pink quite quickly." "If you put it under the fluorescent light..." "Currently this note is protected by a man-made fluorescent process, which is hard, but not impossible, to copy." "But as the counterfeiters become more sophisticated, scientists like Andrew are turning to nature to try and keep one step ahead." "In white light you've got this fairly ordinary looking yellow, but now if I put this under a light that contains a lot of ultraviolet light." "Oh, yeah." "Now this yellow is particularly strong." "The butterfly not only has a yellow fluorescent pigment, it also has a structure that goes with it that enhances that effect, so the structure plus the fluorescent pigment makes it more efficient to produce the colour, but also harder for the counterfeiters to copy." "Andrew finds inspiration from some of the most unlikely sources." "Whilst studying a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber, he noticed the fly's eye exhibited a very peculiar property." "The structure of the surface of the eye allows light to enter without reflecting any of it back." "Copying the structure, he's created a transparent material that is completely anti-reflective." "What you can see is the light reflecting from the Perspex to the smooth surface, and in the centre, where you've got the fly's eye structure embossed onto the surface, all the light is passing through." "That's really obvious, isn't it?" "You can read all the text there cos nothing's been reflected off it, and here I can't reads any text on either side of it, there's just strong light being reflected back." "What applications can you think of for that?" "Well, if you can imagine this was a solar panel, the light that you're seeing reflecting from the smooth Perspex is light lost from the system." "It can't be turned into energy because it's being reflected." "OK." "However in the centre there, you've got more light passing through the surface, and potentially into the solar cells beneath it." "OK." "So by using this structure for solar panels you get a 10% increase in energy capture." "More efficient solar panels are just one of the millions of potential ideas currently locked in the museum's collection." "But Andrew thinks that nature also has the potential to show us how to manufacture some of these planet-saving products." "Often in industry we use high temperatures and pressure, very energy-expensive systems." "In nature they do everything at low temperatures and pressures, so we can save a lot of energy, not much energy is fed into the system." "So I think if we try and copy the process as well as the product in nature, we would be well on our way to solving a lot of our problems." "The future of the museum lies in its historic collections." "It's what scientists need to study, and it's what visitors come to see." "For most of the museum's life, the basic approach to displaying items really didn't change until relatively recently." "This is a cabinet from the earliest days of the museum, preserved to give a glimpse into the past." "It's a scientific display broken up by dense blocks of writing." "But in 1970, suddenly, change was in the air." "And there's nothing new under the sun." "A BBC team was here to capture it." "I've invited some of the people I've met during my time at the museum to see how much has changed, and say what changes they think we can expect in the years ahead." "Carry on, Tim." "Morning gentlemen." "Good morning." "One or two points, gentlemen, before you go." "Keep a good look-out in the whale gallery, the trouble we had last week with these yobbos and people..." "LAUGHTER" "Keep an eye out for all this, all right." "Now it's obviously more about opening it up to the public and kind of welcoming them in." "HE LAUGHS" "Slightly chaotic, doesn't it, with everything just sort of piled up." "Not many labels." "Yes, exactly." "There's a skeleton in the far corner if we just go over." "A guided lecture tour for adults takes place daily on a different theme." "Some of those who attend have come regularly over a period of years." "The style of many exhibits has altered little since the museum opened." "The exhibition officer of the museum would like to see far-reaching changes." "What would you say was wrong with the displays here?" "Well, I think to start off one would say everything is wrong with the displays around here." "They have very, very little, I'm afraid, to commend them at all." "For example, if one looks at this case over here, it's a completely muddled display and one really doesn't know quite what to look at first." "It was almost like..." "A university practicum, and we were expecting university level people to come in and look at it." "Who is it designed for, a display like that?" "Well, I should imagine that this display was designed for a specialist or another scientist who would understand the language." "People see it much more as an entertainment rather than an educational place these days, I suspect." "Which some might say might devalue it in some way, but if you can have people enjoying themselves while they're learning, that's the key thing." "I do think maybe over the last 20 years we've taken a step away from really enabling people to see that amazing diversity of these objects." "I think, clearly, we really need to take a leap forward in how we interpreted the objects, cos it was impenetrable, but I think we've lost something." "You look at those pictures and you just think, wow, some of those galleries looked stunning." "When this film was made, revolution was in the air." "what sort of changes do you really want to make?" "Well, I think you've got to make the museum come alive, and make it appeal to the general public." "The solution was to stack away exhibits and bring in a completely new kind of exhibition, like this." "There was certainly a lot to grab the attention, but if you'd come to see the famous collection then you might have been disappointed." "So this is 1970, so I feel I should be wearing a kipper tie..." "'I've met up with Sharon Ament, the woman responsible 'for planning the kind of exhibitions that we'll be seeing in these galleries in the near future.'" "My mission is to bring some of those 70 million specimens that you've seen onto display." "And you can see when you go around the galleries how people are really drawn by seeing real things." "And this gallery has only got about two real specimens in it, in this great big space." "It seems mad in some ways, doesn't it?" "You're right, and that was a really controversial thing the museum did at the time, and times have really changed now." "I've got to get those specimens out to tell the stories." "Yeah." "Having decided to return to displaying specimens, the next question will be, how should they be displayed?" "It's easy to see how a misjudged display can make a subject incomprehensible, but occasionally the consequences can be much more dramatic." "One museum conservator has been exploring the story of an object that was cut to pieces when the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed it in a less than favourable light." "The Kohinoor is a 105-carat diamond, once the largest diamond in the world." "Thought to have originated in India, it's been in the possession of kings and rulers for 500 years, and today is part of the British Crown Jewels." "This morning, I've been given the chance to take a closer look." "I know what you're thinking." "if the Kohinoor is part of the Crown Jewels, then surely it's locked up in the Tower of London." "Well, it is, but the museum here have their very own copy, although, obviously, it's not made of real diamond, but that's not the reason why I got up so early this morning." "I'm here to find out why, in 1852, the British cut this diamond to 60% of its original size." "Although the museum's vault gallery has had a copy of the Kohinoor for many years, no-one knew, until very recently, what the famous diamond looked like before it was controversially chopped to pieces." "Hello." "I've come to meet the museum's diamond expert-turned-detective, Alan Hart." "So this is it?" "This is it, yes." "This is a model of the uncut Kohinoor that Alan recreated." "One day I went up to the top of our tower and I found, in a bag, in part of the collection, the actual mould it came from." "No way." "And the first thing I saw was the model of Kohinoor and that's when I suddenly realised what I was looking at was a true representation of the diamond itself." "That must have been an incredible moment." "Yeah, it was, awesome, you know." "I thought I've discovered something really unique." "It's been lying in the museum for 150 years, and this was the sort of impetus to make us realise we can then re-cut the stone and discover what it really looked like." "That is incredible." "Alan has been piecing together the story of the ancient diamond." "He's found out how a poor performance at the Great Exhibition in 1851 led to the diamond being cut." "It was the greatest diamond in the world, and they wanted to be displayed as the greatest diamond, so they put it in this fantastic golden cage and mounted on a cushion, very flat." "People came to see the stone and were really disappointed with what it looked like." "Amazing." "You read reports, "I expected a mountain of light, and what I'm getting is a mountain of glass."" "Is it true to say that there is one particular position that was absolutely spectacular, but it was only at a certain time of the day?" "That's right, and the Great Exhibition, the visitors would say" ""Go to see the Kohinoor between 2 and 3 o'clock."" "Because when the sun's out, it was at the perfect angle to shine into these cascading triangular facets and come out as a huge dispersion, and that was when it was really seen in its true light." "Unfortunately, one hour a day wasn't enough to satisfy the Victorians, and the controversial decision was made to re-cut the Kohinoor." "At the time there was an uproar." "Punch magazine, when this beautiful cartoon of the diamond, the Kohinoor, being led to almost the gallows, to have the first cut put on it." "And this lady here saying," ""Ah, he ain't never been altogether bright, so to speak," ""since he made that exhibition of himself in the park."" "The pool old Kohinoor." "Alan is now using computer models to compare the way light reacted with the two versions of the Kohinoor diamond." "We can put light rays through the stone, so now I'm putting light rays through the central part, and then we can turn around and you can see that most of the light comes out through the stone here." "Oh, wow yeah." "You can see how much light is being totally reflected inside the stone, coming back at you, the viewer." "Do you know, I never knew that's how diamonds worked." "So can you show me what happens with the original Kohinoor when you shine a light though it, then?" "Yeah, we've modelled it, so if we put light straight down from the top of the stone, here we go, turn the stone around to see." "You can see that light is actually going straight through the stone." "And this isn't surprising because there is no what we call a pavilion that reflects it." "To reflect it, OK." "But it is sort of channelling the light somewhat, like a magnifying glass, really." "'So that's the confirmation, the diamond was duller in its original form.'" "But then, if you take those light rays out, we can recreate the Great Exhibition at 2 and 3 o'clock." "OK, go for it." "We put the light rays in and you suddenly find that you get a lovely total internal reflection off this bottom flat face here, and it comes back out through these facets here." "To see what that would have actually looked like, Alan is turning to his reconstruction of the old diamond." "So here is our model that we had made." "The moment of truth, did they make a mistake by cutting this?" "Looks gorgeous like this, but let's shine a light at it at an angle to sort of mimic the 2pm." "OK, let's try that." "Perfect." "I think that is absolutely spectacular." "I think you're seeing here that the stone has a fantastic luminosity, it's almost glowing inside." "All those triangular facets reflecting the light, giving a large amount of dispersion, and every now and then you get a huge flash." "Obviously the stone was best viewed from the side." "So who knows, if the Victorians had had the knowledge and technology to display the original Kohinoor as it was intended, then perhaps this uniquely beautiful diamond would still remain today." "Increasingly, technology is ensuring that we do have the real understanding of the exhibits in the collections." "Modern conservators are able to examine specimens in ways that previous generations could only dream of." "Deep in the bowels of the building is a piece of technology that is set to revolutionise both the way the museum collects and how it studies its existing specimens." "Hi, Richie, I've got something for you to scan, it's the head of a hammerhead shark." "Fantastic." "Dr Ritchie Able is a specialist in computed tomography, CT for short." "It's a non-destructive technique of looking inside specimens like this hammerhead shark." "It uses x-rays to image an object in three dimensions." "They're often used in hospitals to scan brain or organs when doctors need to diagnose a medical case." "Although, as this scanner is particularly high-powered, if the shark wasn't already dead, it soon would be." "If I rotate the specimen around, we should be able to see the internal structure." "Oh, yes." "Here we can see the eyes, the nostrils, the brain case, the cervical vertebrae." "And I can see the teeth." "Yes, it's got very large teeth, this specimen, and very sharp." "The scanner takes up to 3,000 individual x-rays like this one, in order to build up a complete 3D picture of the shark." "It's like taking a loaf of bread which has been sliced, and placing the slices one on top of each other, you can reconstruct the loaf." "And the one for the Hammerhead looks like this." "This is a rotating model of the shark head." "Using CT, we can distinguish the different tissues inside the specimen, so here we've been able to do a virtual dissection which pulls out the cartilaginous, nervous and vascular tissue from underneath the muscle and the skin." "That is amazing." "It really does look like you're looking at a real specimen, it's brilliant." "It's important to remember the specimen hasn't been damaged in any way, it's all been done on the computer." "It gets better, though." "Not only can we virtually dissect a specimen and cut it open and slice it, we can also do a fly-through, going inside to view the internal structures to help us understand the anatomy and physiology of a specimen." "So here we have the nostril with the eye and the inlet here, and the water will travel in through the nostril, around in a loop and back out." "And using CT we can take a water's eye view of that journey, so into the nostril now, and the water cascades inside." "And at the back of the nostril we'll spin around and then start to go back out again through the outlet." "And here we can see a shot going out through the nostril and underneath the wing." "Amazing as these images are, it doesn't stop there." "Once the data has been collected it's possible then to print out, in 3D, a copy of the specimen, so that can be handled and studied, rather than the original." "It's made out of plastic, and we can see the external, and if it's printed in a transparent plastic, the internal structure." "It's brilliant, it's mind blowing." "Where could this take us in terms of research and in terms of our knowledge?" "CT scan is going to revolutionise research, particularly the methods that we use in research." "Although the questions that people are trying to answer will stay the same, and for the first time we can really disseminate information globally via the Internet." "Digital reconstructions which can be measured and sampled and analysed in the same way you would analyse a real specimen." "Some day, virtual collections could be shared between museums around the world, even shared by everyone who has access to a computer." "But while virtual collections bring new opportunities, to me, looking at objects on a screen will never be a complete replacement for the real thing." "Electronic displays are fantastic, but there's something about standing next to the real object and just looking." "Especially when that object tells a story." "Australopithecines were a species who lived over three million years ago, but whether they were more ape like or more human like was a mystery." "And then these were found... footprints." "One day, 3.5 million years ago, a fall of volcanic ash was moistened by rain, these footprints were made and then baked hard by the sun." "And it proves that these creatures didn't move like apes, they walked completely upright like modern human beings today." "But, for me, it's more than that, it captures a little scene, you can imagine sort of an afternoon and there's a family wondering across the mudflats." "Cos you've got adults footprints here and some small little juvenile footprints walking alongside." "You can almost see them hand in hand, it's like a little photograph taken in stone." "For me, it's the kind of object that can never really be replaced by technology." "It's kind of magical." "And when the answer to a riddle is contained within stone, even the museum's high-tech scanner can't always find a solution." "Sometimes a puzzle can only be solved by studying the original specimen." "There's something in the museum that's confounded science for 90 years, an object so strange it's been dubbed one of nature's biggest riddles." "Because, for almost a century, no-one has been able to work out what it is." "I'm going to try and unravel the secrets of the mystery spiral with museum palaeontologist Dr Paul Taylor." "It's the weirdest thing." "When it's upright like this it looks weirder, it's seven feet tall, a perfect spiral." "I mean, it looks, to me, a bit like a giant snail." "Well, that's what it was described as originally." "In fact it was called Dinocochlea, which means terrible snail, and there's only one like it in the world, of this size, anyway." "This is a cast based on the original Dinocochlea that workers stumbled across in 1921 while constructing a road in East Sussex." "It looked as though they'd unearthed a giant snail from 135 million years ago." "For the best part of a century, the mystery spiral languished at the back of a museum cupboard set aside for problem cases." "It's time to take a closer look at the original spiral." "This is it, this is the actual specimen." "Yeah, this is the specimen of Dinocochlea." "Now to me it still looks like a snail, I know you say it's not a snail but how do you know for sure?" "Well, there are several bits of evidence to show that it isn't a snail." "One thing is its shear size, it's two metres or more in length, and there are no snails living or past that have been that size." "We have here, this is one of the largest snails that we have." "Well, there is a difference in size there, isn't there?" "And that's tiny compared with this, of course." "Our second reason is that, here, you can see the shell is preserved on the snail, there is no trace of a shell on Dinocochlea at all." "That's pure rock." "Pure rock." "Snail by name, but not by nature." "By the 1930s, some thought the mystery spiral might be a vast piece of fossilised dung." "We do have some fossilised pooh, true pooh, which has a spiral shape." "True pooh, is that a technical term?" "That's the word we like to use for these kind of things." "But this is fossilised pooh, probably from a shark." "Sharks have a spiral valve in their intestines, so they can produce pooh that has a spiral shape to it, like this." "It's sort of similar, but it doesn't quite look right, does it?" "The only evidence that suggests that it could be pooh is the coincidence that it happens to be found near a quarry that has examples of the dinosaur Iguanodon preserved." "Which is a big animal." "A large, huge animal, but it wouldn't produce pooh of anything like that kind of size." "So two major theories both pooh-poohed." "This is driving me nuts because you're not telling me..." "You've told everyone else, you've told the cameraman and the soundman and the director." "You're not telling me, and I've been racking my brains thinking what on Earth it could be, I've even thought maybe some weird unicorn." "You can imagine the horn sticking up." "God, it's some detective story, this." "But like the best detective stories, there are a few clues." "Paul has cut a piece of the mystery spiral and has discovered strange concentric rings running through the stone." "For Paul, those rings looked a lot like the layers inside a phenomenon known as a concretion." "Concretions are lumps of mineral matter found in sediments that usually form around a fossil and then build up, layer by layer." "This led Paul to a whole new theory about what made the mystery spiral." "So what exactly is your theory?" "Well, I believe that Dinocochlea was formed by a tiny little worm that burrowed into the sediment, and this point in the centre, I believe, is where the original burrow was." "You can see there's a slightly paler dot in the centre." "That's like a millimetre across." "Well, the worm that I think made this burrow was probably only a millimetre or so in diameter, and it burrowed in a corkscrew manner, in a spiral manner." "So a burrow sort of winding its way through, and what's happened is the..." "What sort of rock is this?" "It's a sandstone." "So that's built itself up around that millimetre-wide burrow is what you think." "Yeah, the concretion has grown around that in a series of rings." "So in order to prove your theory, what do you actually need to do?" "Well, what I'd like to do now is make a second cut on this specimen, and then we hope that we'll see that the burrow will have moved its location from one cut to the other," "because it's going down as a corkscrew." "So we're employing the expertise of Tony Whitton." "He's been preparing rocks in the museum for 34 years." "And there's Dinocochlea." "OK, so now it needs to go in here." "OK." "How long do you reckon that might take?" "Well, it'll probably take at least an hour." "So, is that done now?" "It's finished now." "The original side is the one here." "Can you see the burrow where it's come out on this side?" "Well, I think I can." "Er, I believe it's here." "Now, that's actually moved a lot." "If I put my finger on there and you put your finger there where the..." "I put my finger here." "So there's two or three inches difference between the two, which is exactly the evidence we were hoping to get, showing that spiral." "It's an irony that this seven-foot spiral will always be called Dinocochlea, "the terrible snail"." "But it turns out it may have all been started by a tiny worm no more than a centimetre long making a spiral burrow at the bottom of the ocean 135 million years ago." "As sand became rock, a concretion grew around the worm's tiny handiwork, reflecting the shape of the original burrow." "One of the museum's oldest riddles may finally have been solved." "Preservation of items for hundreds, even thousands, of years, is an art that's been perfected over centuries." "Plants are dried to prevent decay, but animals present more of a challenge." "Once, each scientist had their own alcoholic concoction for preserving their finds." "Today, museum conservators all use a solution called industrial methylated spirits." "It's believed that this solution could allow items to sit quietly on these shelves for a 1,000 years." "But history has shown that conservators need to be ready for anything." "Once in a while, the historic collections are faced by a much greater threat than mere decay." "Now, even today, some 60 years after the end of the war," "I'm not really allowed to tell you exactly where I am." "Now, that may be more for commercial reasons rather than protecting wartime secrets, but that veil of secrecy certainly adds to the sense of intrigue." "And this is my destination, a network of caves deep inside the hillside... because it was here in the autumn of 1941 that over 25,000 bottles and jars from the spirit collection made the same journey down these dark, cramped tunnels." "Packed into over 900 wooden crates, the specimens were brought here, some 200 feet below ground, and it's here, too, I meet museum archivist Polly Parry to find out why such extraordinary lengths were needed." "The risk in London was really quite large." "The museum had been hit badly in the blitz in the autumn of 1940." "Obviously, as all these collections were in alcohol, there was a very high fire risk." "Despite the risks, it was impossible to move the entire spirit collection out of the museum, so this bunker was reserved for the most important, the irreplaceable type specimens which are used to describe new species." "And actually, look here." "You can see the evidence that is wasn't all entirely without its problems." "Are these the genuine glass bottles?" "Yes, these will be some that got broken in the evacuation process." "The ones that are coloured, that was to indicate they were the type specimens and, as you can see, there's quite a few all around us here." "Although now safe from German bombs, the collection quickly came under attack from a very different type of enemy." "They had white fungi, black fungi, and each of these different fungi attacked different parts of the materials down here." "This fungus began covering the boxes, the packing sawdust inside and, most dramatically, the labels on the jars." "Now, with the labels being obscured or, worse, peeling off completely, drastic action was needed." "It's not just the name of what's inside it, it's also the historical information, which is all fundamental to the value of the specimen." "If the labels go, then the specimen inside becomes unidentified so becomes useless." "Fortunately, there was one man who could save the day," "Alec Fraser-Brunner, described in the archives as a temporary scientific worker." "He organised an urgent and radical scheme to overhaul the entire collection." "He said all of it has to come back to the surface, it all has to be brought up, dried out, the sawdust thrown away, and where there weren't any internal labels in the bottles," "they had to be put in, because there was always going to be the risk of the outside labels falling off because of the conditions down here that they couldn't do anything about." "It's seriously cold down here." "Yes." "Now, I keep seeing bits of slate like this." "What is it?" "These are from the shelves that were part of Fraser-Brunner's plan." "He brought in about 5,000 bricks, 2,000 slates and made them up into shelves from simple single platforms up to tiers of four or six high." "And it came to about 260 metres of shelving, which, if you laid it end to end, is longer than the main facade of the Natural History Museum." "For over ten months, Brunner and his team toiled in the dark, cramped conditions." "And to add to their woes, there were heavy rains, which turned the roads and the footpaths into streams and quagmires." "In fact, so vital was Fraser-Brunner to the collection here that when he was called up, the museum appealed to the War Office for him to be let off his military service." "The keeper of zoology writes in his notes there was no time for the usual proprieties, so he wrote directly to the War Office, made the case that these are collections of national importance and Fraser-Brunner is literally the only man who can do it." "The appeal worked, and he was relieved of his war duty until 1944." "A year later, the collections were safely returned to the museum." "Although Fraser-Brunner went on to a long and distinguished career in science, when he died in 1986, he did so as just one of the millions of unsung heroes created by the Second World War." "For while he wasn't fighting on the front line, his role as protector and custodian of those 25,000 irreplaceable specimens was something for which the museum and the wider scientific community will be eternally grateful." "Specimens are the origins of the museum and they will be central to its future." "The latest initiative not only puts specimens on display but allows visitors to hear the latest thinking through daily talks in a newly-opened theatre named after Sir David Attenborough." "'I met Sir David earlier in the series and took the opportunity 'to ask him what he sees as the role of the museum in the future.'" "Well, I don't see any reason why it should particularly change." "It will always have..." "A museum like this will always have a need, a duty to allow the public to see what these things are." "It's the public's money, after all, that supports it." "But it will also go on having this kind of research, because the things it has here, it's not just abstract and saying, "OK, let's do a bit of research,"" "the point it that these objects which I'm surrounded here and which is in the rest of the museum have a huge research potential in them, and to have the time perspective which this museum gives you, which means that you could say," ""I wonder if this butterfly has actually changed its character over the past 150 years"." "How would you know?" "This is one of the few places that could tell you, because you will be able to go and you'll be able to find a drawer there and find stuff that was collected in 1860, you know, and you think, "Crikey!"" "And you can actually from now, of course, use it for research in a way that the people who collected it never dreamed of." "And the latest research is suggesting that some of the collection's oldest rocks could contain the secrets of the origins of life itself." "I'm Caroline Smith, and I'm the curator of meteorites here at the Natural History Museum." "My job is to look after the nearly 5,000 fragments of meteorites that we have here in the collections." "Meteorites are rocks from space." "Maybe there's been an impact in the asteroid belt or a large comet or asteroid's hit the moon or Mars, blasted material off, that's floated round in space, and then some of that material's" "come through earth's atmosphere, hit the earth and landed as a meteorite." "Well, this meteorite is called Parnallee, and if you'd been around in India in 1857, when this fell, you would have seen this spectacular fireball which is like a sort of mega shooting star." "That's actually caused by the rock, because it's coming through the atmosphere, it's going so quickly, it get so hot that the surface of the rock, the minerals within this rock, actually begin to melt, and that's what forms this spectacular fireball." "You can see on the outside this very, very black crust, and this is a very, very good indicator of a freshly fallen meteorite." "We've got meteorites from the asteroid belt, and these are the meteorites that are the really old meteorites." "These are the ones that keep all of that information of the processes and the conditions that were happening just as the solar system was forming, so they're like little time capsules, little windows back in time, to be able to go 4.6 billion years ago" "to find out what was happening when the solar system was first forming, and that, for me, is just mind-blowing." "As well as telling us what they're made out of and being able to give us information about how they formed, these are really beautiful things to look at." "I mean, I often think they look very much like stained-glass windows, actually." "Some meteorites have actually got quite a lot of carbon in them, and some of that carbon is in the form of amino acids." "Now, amino acids are a crucial ingredient for life, and we know that the earth was bombarded by meteorites and comets over the first few hundred million years of its existence, and a lot of people, including myself," "believe that these meteorites actually provided the chemical building blocks for life to start on earth." "I mean, it's mind-blowing to think that maybe life originated from space." "Every item in the collection is a small part of the story of life on earth." "Each piece is precious, and every one is checked from time to time as part of its conservation." "The easiest to monitor are those on display, as any change is quickly noticed." "Chi-Chi the panda now sits with a view of the museum's cafe and is one of the most recognised exhibits in the museum." "It's that panda again." "It is that panda." "But even the most popular items occasionally need a closer inspection." "After the public have gone, zoology curator Louise Thompset has arranged to monitor and record the condition of Britain's best-known panda." "So, when was the last time that Chi-Chi was sort of checked out and cleaned and all the rest of it?" "It was a very long time ago." "To be honest, we're not entirely sure." "So you don't really know." "I don't really know, so..." "So we could be the first for a long, long time." "Yep." "So glass is out." "Ooh!" "Glass is out, and here we are." "Right, so I've put the sheets down." "Looks like a teddy bears' picnic." "Just need some jam sandwiches." "What's next?" "Bamboo sandwiches, maybe." "Well, what I need you to do is just do an outline of Chi-Chi." "You want me to draw the bear?" "I want you to draw the bear." "You don't have to do too much detail, but it's just really so we can note on..." "It doesn't have to be like it too much, does it?" "But you need to get the ears and general shape round the side, just so we can mark on..." "OK." "I'll do some ears." "Sort of goes like that." "# Do, do-do, do, do... #" "Now remember, this is going to be kept for all time in the archive." "Oh, will it?" "This is great." "It's got some teeth, hasn't it?" "Hang on." "It's got another arm, like that" "Right, OK." "And then I'm done." "So..." "Ah." "Er, yes, that'll do." "That's brilliant!" "You know that Chi-Chi was supposedly the inspiration for the World Wildlife Fund logo?" "I think the design was slightly different." "If they'd phoned me up, I could have done it." "Look, that's brilliant." "Looks quite angry, though." "Not just the inspiration for a logo, Chi-Chi was a national celebrity and London Zoo's most popular resident for 14 years." "Caught in Sichuan in China in 1957, Chi-Chi was displayed in Peking Zoo." "Zoos all over the world were clamouring for pandas, a deal was struck, and Chi-Chi set off for America." "But a last-minute ban on goods from communist countries left Chi-Chi homeless until she was housed by London Zoo." "As one of only two pandas in the world outside China, Chi-Chi became an international superstar." "The world was drawn into the soap opera of attempts to mate Chi-Chi with An-An, the panda in Moscow." "Though Chi-Chi showed no interest in An-An, her popularity only grew." "And when she died, she was presented to the museum as a much-loved icon and a specimen of a creature rarely seen outside of its home country." "A little bit of hair loss there." "She's actually in amazing condition." "Yeah." "So, what kind of value does a specimen have like this?" "People love to come and see her, she's one of the favourites, but surely she can't have a lot of scientific value now." "Every specimen we have in the collection is unique and it represents an animal at a unique place and time, and Chi-Chi sort of bridges the gap between what we have on display and also being a scientifically valuable specimen and is a very good resource, for example," "for sampling that we do from specimens." "We don't have many pandas in the collection." "What you can do is potentially take a sample of skin or hair and be able to extract DNA from that, and then people can use that to look at how populations have reduced, see if there's inbreeding and potential for disease and so on and look at captive breeding, as well." "Yeah." "Extracting DNA from museum items, to study current inbreeding, is the latest use of the historic collections." "It means that animals long since deceased are now taking an active part in saving their own species." "And that's exactly what has happened with these birds, echo parakeets from the island of Mauritius." "It's amazing this wonderful echo parakeet is here at all, because it was once teetering on the brink of extinction." "When I was last here, more than 20 years ago, the population had reached an all-time low of about a dozen birds, and only two of those were breeding females." "But now, thanks to one of the most intense conservation efforts in the world, the current total is about 460 birds." "But there's a catch." "When you breed from very few individuals, you can create a whole new set of problems." "Hello!" "Karl Jones, an old friend and renowned conservationist, understands the complications inbreeding causes better than anyone." "They all started to lose their feathers, and I looked at them and I thought, "Oh, my gosh, what's going wrong?"" "Many of Karl's echo parakeets had succumbed to beak and feather disease, a highly contagious and fatal virus." "This one, unfortunately..." "Doesn't look so good." "It looks like a... feather off a feather duster." "As you can see, lots of these feathers are falling out." "Oh, dear, and this tray is full of feathers as well, isn't it?" "These birds are vulnerable in a way that their ancestors were not." "Because they are so very rare and so very inbred, they can catch these diseases far more easily." "These museum specimens date back to the 1850s, a time when echo parakeets were still genetically diverse and strong." "One man has been wondering if the genetic information locked away in these specimens could help save the species." "Simon Tollington is from the University of Kent." "This is basically just so that we do as much as we can to prevent spreading feather dust between nest sites." "OK." "Simon wants to find out how the population crash affected the genetics and immune systems of the birds, so he takes blood samples from all the new hatchlings." "So, you do this every day in the season?" "Pretty much, yeah." "It's more than once a day, as well." "Not too bothered." "She's so trusting, no protest at all." "It's also a chance for Simon to monitor the chicks for beak and feather disease." "OK, we've still got two chicks, so that's good news." "Excellent." "Good, no sign of the disease immediately." "No, not at all." "Do they struggle when you're doing that or are they quite laid-back about it?" "I wouldn't say struggle." "They don't exactly like being handled, I don't think." "OK." "So, if you can just take the bucket once I'm low enough..." "Yep." "Then I'm just going to slip it over my head." "OK." "OK?" "Got it?" "Yeah, and there they are." "Zoe will be watching us, making sure we don't do anything." "194." "Simon needs to monitor the chicks' growth before he takes blood and returns them to the wild." "It's got the claws in there." "The trick is not to let it run off." "That's perfect, yep." "130mm." "What we're going to do now is take the blood, so..." "From the jugular." "From the jugular." "This looks unbelievably tricky." "It's OK." "It's not going to hurt much." "You two do it with so much more confidence." "I'm petrified about hurting it." "So, what's the actual practical application of this for conservation?" "This sample will go back to the UK for genetic analysis, and what we're hoping to learn from that is how the genes in the population have changed since the population bottleneck." "So what we do is we use museum specimens and take DNA samples from these specimens, and we can look at the genetic variability before and after the population crash, and with this we use data on immune function as well," "so we can then hand-pick individuals that we think might be suitable for creating new populations." "So what you're doing is you're basically cherry-picking the best echo parakeets, if you like." "Exactly, yeah." "Obviously, with this disease, if we can select individuals that are more capable to deal with it, then they've got a much better chance of creating a viable long-term population." "Well done." "So are we done with this one now?" "Yep, that's it, all finished." "We've to put them back in their bags and take them back to the box." "Good." "And they seem none the worse for wear." "Hopefully not." "Plenty of them have had it done before, we haven't had anything go wrong, so..." "Something to talk about in the nest box." "Selective breeding, based on these tests and information from DNA in the museum specimens could be used to create a more robust population, echo parakeets better equipped to deal with the challenges of life." "The collections have clues about the future." "They hint at what's in store for the world and how we might tackle it" "But one question remains - what's in store for us?" "Chris Stringer has spent a lifetime studying ancient human remains to piece together the story of our history." "I wondered how much he can now project forward and tell me what lies ahead for humanity." "There is a view, yes, that our culture protects us from the effects of natural selection, but I don't agree with that." "I think that we're under selection as much as we ever were" "Billions of people globally are still suffering from... insufficient food, insufficient water, insufficient medical care." "They're still strongly under the effects of selection." "We have people who are obese, there's exposure to alcohol, to drugs." "All of these things are also selective forces." "So I think evolution is carrying on, but it's difficult to project where we will go, so we see these reconstructions of people with stick-thin bodies and giant brains, but that's very unlikely." "You can see how big our brain is and how we've evolved these large skulls." "Now, if you had a crystal ball, how would you see our evolution mapping out in the future?" "Would our brain get bigger and bigger?" "That's a very difficult one." "Obviously, in terms of brain size, we can see this increase of brain size through time, but I think probably our brain size is at about its limits, and there's actually evidence that, in the last 20,000 years," "brain size has got smaller, incredibly, in modern humans." "And some of that is probably related to a decrease in body size, but one could argue that, obviously, you can't just grow brains regardless." "They've got energetic costs, you've got to run that brain, and of course our brain size is at about the limits of the female pelvis's ability to deliver a baby." "So I think those are real constraints, and one could argue that, obviously, we now store a lot of information externally, in our computers, our mobile phones, in other people's brains, so a lot of the selective value of having that big brain may be disappearing." "'But Chris thinks there's a bigger factor that could impact on human evolution in the future.'" "If the predictions about global warming are correct, in the next 100 years we're going to see more climate change than we've seen in the previous 10,000 years, and if that happens, that will interfere with predictions we ever make about where humans are going." "So something as drastic as climate change could push our evolution in a totally different direction." "Yes." "If the worst projections are correct, then the tropics and sub-tropics will become uninhabitable for humans and we'll have people surviving in relatively small numbers at the north and south poles." "And selection again will be operating there, because large numbers of people will die out because of that massive environmental change and the ones who survive will be, in a sense, the lucky few, whoever they are, at the north and south poles, and the future of humanity will be in their hands." "That's it, six hours' worth." "There are whole rooms we didn't even go into, entire disciplines, whole lifetimes worth of work we didn't even touch on." "Maybe the museum is too big for any one person to really get to grips with," "Maybe the museum is too big for any one person to really get to grips with, too big even for one generation to understand." "These collections are for all time, and what one generation misses, another picks up on." "Changing ideas and changing technology means that each generation sees these amazing collections in a fresh light." "Our job is to do what we can with the collections and to make sure that we pass them on to the next generation in good condition." "An understanding of the world, the future of an individual species, even the future of humanity itself could, some day, be influenced by the items stored in the labyrinth of this museum." "And because this is one of the greatest natural-history collections on earth," "I don't doubt that in another 100 years, some of this century's greatest ideas will be sparked right here at the Natural History Museum, the museum of life." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"