Thursday 24 November 2022 02:02 AM CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV trends now
Into Dinosaur Valley With Dan Snow
Rating: ****
The Ice Cream Wars
Rating: ****
Well, that’s yet another childhood illusion shattered. Dippy, the colossal dinosaur fossil that stood guard in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London for decades, isn’t real.
The bones are copies, cast in plaster of Paris. Worse, they don’t even come from a single diplodocus skeleton, but are mixed and matched from at least two sets of remains.
The original is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, said Dan Snow on Into Dinosaur Valley (C5). The fossils were first discovered on July 4, 1899, Independence Day in the States — which is why, in America, Dippy is known as the Star Spangled Dinosaur.
Dippy, the colossal dinosaur fossil that stood guard in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London for decades, isn’t real. The bones are copies, cast in plaster of Paris
It’s fake, it’s manipulated and it’s American. The museum trustees might as well have stuck Kim Kardashian in her undies on a podium at the front doors. A generation of schoolboys would have found that equally memorable.
Dan visited both museums, but he was far happier in the wilds of Colorado and Montana. His real calling is to be an explorer, a frontiersman, but he was born a couple of centuries too late.
Abandoning his 4x4 at the roadside in a deserted mud plain, he donned his wide-brimmed hat and strode off towards the horizon, where a fossil dig was underway.
‘Welcome to Jurassic Park,’ called out a paleontologist and a wistful smile passed across Dan’s face. There’s nothing he’d enjoy more than being chased in a Jeep by velociraptors.
He had the right headgear, like Sam Neill in the movie, but it’s not a good idea to wear low-waisted chinos to an excavation. As he crouched
