Fern the Diplodocus and the Jurassic Garden, supported by Kusuma Trust, will greet visitors as they approach the Natural History Museum.
The Natural History Museum’s latest attraction stands tall over our new gardens: Fern the Diplodocus.
But installing Fern hasn’t come without its difficulties. Creating a life-size bronze cast of a dinosaur skeleton with no supports had never been attempted before. The engineers had to take pointers from how the dinosaurs would have been in life to make it work.
Walking up from the underground Tube exit and through the new gardens, visitors will be greeted by a familiar face.
Based on the original 1905 Diplodocus replica, the gleaming bronze dinosaur – newly named Fern – towers over guests as they meander through the tree ferns and horsetails similar to those its real-life counterpart lived alongside.
From start to finish, the project was a three-year collaboration between scientists at the Natural History Museum, art conservationists Factum Arte and engineering company Structure Workshop.
Whilst to the uninitiated creating a bronze sauropod cast might seem relatively straight forward, it turned out to be a little more complicated in life.
“The design and engineering behind Fern was an immense, but exciting, technical and creative challenge,” explains Max Clayton, the lead engineer for the project at Structure Workshop.
“Dinosaur skeletons are usually displayed inside, well protected from the elements, and are carefully hung, propped, cradled and supported as needed to protect either the precious fossils themselves or delicate plaster casts of the originals.”
“With Fern, the task was more ambitious. Diplodocus was one of the longest dinosaurs – the skeleton itself is over 25 metres long – including 15 metres of tail held in the air, which tapers down to the width of a human finger.”
The idea was to position the new cast in a dynamic life-like pose with no supporting armature. Whilst this might sound relatively straightforward, it turned out to be quite complicated.
The first stage of creating Fern was fairly easy. While the original Dippy cast was being moved during its UK tour in 2021, our team of scientists took the opportunity to digitally scan every one of its 292 bones.
A team of engineers, architects and 3D modellers then used this to begin the process of designing the new bronze cast.
Crafting the iconic dinosaur out of bronze is deceptively complicated. The original Dippy already had a mount to support it and fossils are usually displayed indoors, protected from the weather. None of these aspects applied to the designs for Fern.
When Dippy was on tour of the UK, our scientists took the opportunity to scan each of its bones.
The cast needed to be created to be displayed outside, where it would be exposed to the fluctuating weather and temperatures of London. On top of that, making it out of heavy bronze for the entire 25 metres of the dinosaur in a life-like pose and with no visible supports created additional significant challenges.
The team worked closely with our dinosaur expert Professor Paul Barrett. Over his decades-long career, Paul has become a world expert in sauropod dinosaurs and so there was no one better to consult about how the animals would have moved in life.
Paul checked each of the bone scans to make sure they were accurate. This also gave him the unique opportunity to correct anatomical mistakes made when Dippy was first constructed 119 years ago.
The project has allowed researchers to correct a few inaccuracies in the original cast, such as the positioning of the feet. ©Oak Taylor-Smith / Factum Arte
“We spotted, for example, that the vertebra closest to the skull was actually upside down,” explains Paul. “So, we rotated it to be the right way up.”
“We also noticed that some of the bones weren’t in exactly the right positions. Some of this was due to natural deformation of the fossils, which aren’t always the exact shape that the bones were originally, but there were other parts of the skeleton where we thought we could do slightly better.”
This included adjusting the hips of the dinosaur to bring them together in a more natural arrangement than before. The original cast had also made the dinosaur “slightly knock kneed”, according to Paul, so this was corrected too.
Finally, they were able to put the feet in a more lifelike position. “We’ve been able to pose the hands and feet in a more anatomically correct orientation because although these are big animals they actually were a bit like ballerinas,” says Paul.
“They walked around on their toes. So, instead of having the feet flat against the floor as they were in the old mount, we’re able to arch the foot up slightly because in life they would have had a big pad of fat under them, like an elephant foot does.”
By creating models of the bones, the engineers at Factum Arte and Structure Workship were able to vigorously test the cast and come up with novel solutions to the problems encountered. ©Oak Taylor-Smith / Factum Arte
It took several weeks to process the scan data from the bones and figure out exactly how each bone aligned, before setting it in a position that made it look like the dinosaur was ambling through an ancient forest.
After exposing the computer model to rigorous structural analysis, the team of engineers were then able to move on to the next step.
This involved 3D printing a few test vertebrae and models to better understand their properties and how they’d behave. Here, the team ran into a major problem. The individual bones cast from bronze were too heavy, and the areas of contact between each bone too small, for the skeleton to support itself along its entire length. The cast would simply break apart.
It would take the team months of conducting state-of-the-art science and testing new techniques to figure out how to construct Fern.
“Much of the hard work and stress was caused by the inadequacy of standard engineering strategies for the task at hand,” explains Max. “With no precedent to draw from – as no project like Fern has ever been attempted – we found instead that nature provided the best inspiration.”
“Often, elegant design solutions already existed in the anatomy of the dinosaur itself, refined by evolution over millions of years.”
The team turned to nature in order to solve many of the issues, including giving the cast hollow bones just as sauropods would have had in life. ©Oak Taylor-Smith / Factum Arte
The first of these solutions was one of the key reasons why sauropod dinosaurs like Fern could get so big in the first place: hollow bones.
Just like birds today, the bones of these dinosaurs were filled with air sacs, with a thin scaffolding of internal struts to prevent the bone from collapsing inwards. This provided the perfect solution for Fern, with the engineers replicating nature and making each bone hollow with internal scaffolding.
This allowed the team to make the skeleton from a material much heavier than the bones would have been in life. The next issue was that of the connections between the bones themselves.
“To achieve the self-supporting structural solution that was proposed, each vertebra would need a completely flat bearing surface against the next vertebra,” explains Elly Cornforth, our Project Manager who was overseeing the construction of Fern. But because bones are naturally rounded and the scans were based on old, Victorian casts, this wasn’t the case.
“To ensure that the bronze vertebrae would be completely flush against each other, the engineers proposed what was basically a bronze disc to mimic cartilage between each vertebra. It’s quite fascinating and Paul noted that the structural solution that they came up with actually had similarities to the animal’s natural biology.”
One of the main issues was figuring out how to make the dinosaurs characteristically long neck and tail entirely self-supporting. ©Oak Taylor-Smith / Factum Arte
The final problem was one of the key aspects of the construction. How do you make a bronze skeleton with a characteristically long neck and tail with no visible supports?
Once again, the team looked to how the dinosaurs would have done this themselves. The solution was to run steel cables from the head, through each bone along its neck and anchor them at the dinosaur’s hips. This was then replicated in the opposite direction for its tail.
These cables are essentially doing the same job that tendons and muscles would have done when the dinosaur was alive.
“It’s quite innovative engineering actually, and makes use of post tensioned cables which you would often see in bridge structures,” explains Elly. Just like a suspension bridge, the cast is designed to flex.
“On a windy day, you’ll see the head and the tail moving in tandem in quite a dynamic way. This movement has been allowed for in the design and actually makes Fern stronger by making it more able to withstand the forces from the wind.”
It took years to figure out, but eventually the team managed to create the world's first fully self-supporting. life-size bronze Diplodocus cast. ©Oak Taylor-Smith / Factum Arte
By combining all of these innovative solutions, we were able to produce a fully self-supporting, life-size bronze Diplodocus, something which has never been achieved before.
“They approached all of this from a strictly engineering point of view, but it’s interesting that the solutions that they found were essentially biological solutions to the same problem that a living Diplodocus would have had,” says Paul.
“I suspect that some of the solutions they’ve found to these problems are probably publishable in a scientific journal.”
It’s not just Fern who has been inspired by the latest science. The Diplodocus is joined by a much smaller dinosaur, the bronze cast of a little deer-like Hypsilophodon, which would have scurried around the ancient forest floor of what’s now the Isle of Wight.
This is the most accurate skeleton of this dinosaur ever made. Using research conducted by our scientists, the team were able to reconstruct the skull in more detail than has ever been done before, to reveal what this animal would have looked like in life.
The Hysilophodon cast incorporates cutting-edge science, making it the most accurate reconstruction ever created.
The plants these casts nestle among are not just a backdrop – they’re also as scientifically accurate as possible. Each species growing in the gardens has been chosen and placed for specific reasons, following advice from Robbie Blackhall-Miles, an expert on ancient plants.
As visitors exit the tunnel from the underground, they’ll be transported back to when plants first colonised land. These early pioneers included mosses and liverworts. Then, as plants gained in complexity, vascular plants such as ferns evolved.
Moving through the gardens, visitors will encounter these ferns and related species before they start to see other early plants, such as pine trees. As they approach the main entrance to the Museum, visitors will finally reach the point in time when flowering plants such as grasses evolved.
Visitors can visit our newly opened gardens from Thursday 18 July and experience the Evolution Garden and bronze dinosaur casts for themselves.
Our gardens follow the story of how life on Earth has changed over time, from the days of the dinosaurs through to today.
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