
Dippy gets the heave-ho
Britain’s Natural History museum ditches dinosaur, replaces it with a more socially conscious exhibit.
I kid you not.
As the centrepiece of one of Britain’s great museums, it has inspired visitors for more than a century.
But the Natural History Museum’s famous model of a diplodocus, known affectionately to schoolchildren as Dippy, is to be retired after 110 years.
Bosses at the London institution have decided the 83ft long exhibit is no longer relevant enough to take pride of place in their great entrance hall.
They are to replace it with a skeleton of a giant blue whale, as a reminder of ‘our responsibility to the planet’.
The whale, previously the centrepiece of the Mammal Hall, and a resident of the museum since 1891, is a symbol of environmental destruction and hope, [director Sir Michael Dixon] said.