Butterflies and Mammoths

This afternoon, we went to the Natural History Museum to see the new (but temporary) exhibition on mammoths, featuring "Lyuba", a frozen mammoth calf which died when it fell into a muddy hole a month after its birth around 42,000 years ago; it was excavated from the Siberian permafrost a few years ago and (until any other turn up) is currently the best-preserved of any mammoth mummies. (Photography inside the exhibition is prohibited, but there's a range of images of the calf here. The Wikipedia entry for the calf contains details of its discovery, including some which the videos accompanying the exhibition completely omit.) We also went to the Sensational Butterflies" exhibition (another temporary exhibition) in the Museum's forecourt: a heated tent which has been set up every summer since 2008 to house tropical butterflies flittering about and (if you're lucky) landing on you. I wasn't lucky; but Judith was -- see the accompanying photographic evidence of a butterfly on her hair. (We were not able to identify the species of butterfly in question.)



This being half-term, the Museum was overrun with children (shriek, gibber, run away), being led around by platoons of harassed parents; the most enormous queues were for the dinosaurs, which are perennially popular. There were also large queues for the mammoths exhibition, for which an entry fee is levied (entry to all the other parts of the Museum is free); but we, being Museum Members, were able to flourish our membership card and jump straight past the head of the queue without having to pay anything at all. The paying visitors were left seething with jealousy, doubtless.