No longer can natural history museums expect to pull crowds in with stuffed animals in glass cases. This generation demands something more hands-on, more interactive, and the Natural History Museum of London (a vast 19th-century building with over 68 million specimens) has responded, spending more than $20 million on a set of multimedia galleries that tell the story of the birth of the universe. It's a humbling experience to peer billions of years into the past and learn about periods of mass extinction, which have wiped out more species than currently exist.
Can't make it to London? No problem. The museum's Web site is equally impressive. Created in July 1994, the site was the first of its kind among British museums. It's a simple affair that gets better as you delve deeper. One feature, Quest, lets you study a number of specimens from different angles - measuring, weighing, and subjecting them to ultraviolet light.
I was lured to the scientific side of the site, where I checked out Las Cuevas Research Station in Belize, which studies natural and human impacts on the biological diversity of the Maya Forest. Science Casebook gives a less technical description of specific projects, like the hunt for traces of DNA preserved in prehistoric insects trapped in amber. But perhaps the most interesting feature is a list of Web links. Before long, I found myself browsing through images of dinosaurs provided by the Illinois State Geological Survey.
With so much mediocre information on the Web, this sort of guide to quality sites is becoming increasingly important. The Natural History Museum of London is an impressive global gateway to information about the natural world.
Natural History Museum of London: www.nhm.ac.uk.
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