This is the beautiful facade of the Natural History Museum in London, our first stop on our European sojourn. Built in the late 1800s, it's a masterpiece of Victorian terra-cotta architecture.
The great hall inside the museum makes this juvenile Diplodocus specimen (nicknamed "Dippy") look puny. Here, the dinosaur curator Paul Barrett and I are discussing the finer points of Dippy's cloaca.
Our meeting place everyday was at the foot of this giant sloth.
It sure would be great if all the fossils were in beautiful halls, but the reality of specimen work at museums is that you spend a lot of time in windowless basements peering into drawers.
It wouldn't be England without a trip to the pub to have one of the many cask ales. These rather poorly carbonated, room temperature quaffs actually taste pretty good. The bartender "pulls" you a pint by manually pumping the ale from a cask in the basement - sort of like an antique water pump.
While in England, we couldn't resist a chance to pore over the dinosaur collections at Oxford University's Museum of Natural History. Among this museum's many claims to fame is that it holds one of the best remaining specimens of the Dodo. We did get a chance to see it, but no flash photography was allowed.
The interior of the O.U.M.N.H. is another triumph of Victorian Architecture, but this time in cast iron.
Because we know the Curator, they kindly left the lights on for us at night.
Couldn't resist this one: this short article posted on the collections at Oxford describes how the first dinosaur discovered was formally named "Scrotum humanum." Yes, that means "a dude's balls," and you can probably get why a scientist in the 1600s might have chosen that moniker. Luckily it didn't stick. We think this might be the dinosaur we call "Megalosaurus" today.
From left to right: Yoshi (Oxford grad student), Blair, Kimi, Roger Benson (my friend and collaborator who is a prof at Oxford). We're in a very old bar called the Lamb and Flag, which dates to 1695, has a fireplace big enough to walk into, and is one of the places J.R.R. Tolkien's writing club used to meet.
Later in the evening, we went to the Bear, a pub that dates to 1242. Yes, 1242.
Over the weekend, we had a bit of time for sight-seeing, and our friend Simon took us on a fantastic walking tour of London. Here are the gates at Buckingham Palace (with the guard changing inside).
And here are two London classics: Big Ben and a double-decker bus.
Feeling a bit shot from all the walking, we clambered onto a ferry and zigzagged down the Thames, drinking ale and gawking at the many bridges and pieces of stately architecture. Here I am marveling at the London Eye, a massive ferris wheel built for the millenial celebrations. The wheel of this thing is 400 feet in diameter!
By popular demand, a group photo
Our ferry ride ended at the infamous Tower of London, which despite the singular title is actually a collection of many many towers. If you zoom in you can see the enormous crowd that has gathered for an Armistice Day installation of ceramic poppies in the Tower Moat.
Dodging the crowds at the Tower, we finished our sight-seeing at the British Museum, which is the cultural sibling to the Natural History Museum. This is the incredible atrium.
My favorite exhibit was on the ship burials of the old Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Sutton Hoo and the post-Roman inhabitants of England.
The display included this Bog Dude, preserved by plastination. He'd been assassinated and tossed into a peat swamp sometime in the Iron Age.
Random dude, me, and Simon enjoying a well-deserved half pint after our epic walk around the city.
Our final stop in Old Blighty was the famous town of Cambridge, home of Cambridge University. The University is very different to an American or South African school, being instead a loose affiliation of Colleges, each with their own entrance and graduation requirements. On the left is King's College, the richest of Cambridge's constituents.
Here's a quick snapshot of the interior of the King's College chapel, a modest little structure...
Our friend Matt is a graduate student at Cambridge and served as a knowledgable tour guide. Here he and Kimi are standing on the walkway in King's College. Only members of the College with certain credentials are allowed to set foot on the grass.
The heavily channelized River Cam runs all through town, and a favorite pastime of the posh is to engage in a bit of "punting". This basically amounts to pushing a low-gunneled boat along with a very long and unwieldy stick.
The facade at Trinity College. The statue is of Henry the VIIIth. If you look closely, you'll see he's holding a rather plain-looking chair leg. Apparently this was some sort of 18th century drunken prank, further proving that nothing has ever changed in higher education.
Well that's about it for the England component of the trip. I did have the chance to hang out with my old advisers Jim and Cathy, but our camera was dead by that point. Tomorrow, part zwei: Germany!
Awesome! Nice work Kimi! LOL!
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