Dominating the Central Hall, and among the most impressive sights in the Museum, is the massive skeleton of the dinosaur Diplodocus, one of the largest land animals that ever lived.
In the dinosaur gallery there is an amazing selection of dinosaur skeletons on show. There is also a series of exhibits about dinosaurs' way of life and how we piece together our knowledge from clues left 120 million years ago.
Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 160 million years, but they became extinct fairly abruptly, about 60 million years before the first humans appeared. In the exhibition you can see the fossilized remains of many different kinds and sizes of dinosaur - from the huge to the comparatively small. They have been found in rocks from many parts of the world, including Britain, and recent expeditions are still discovering astonishing new species. There must be many more for us to find yet.
The only direct evidence we have of what dinosaurs were like, comes from the fossils we are lucky enough to find. The hard parts of the body - the bones and teeth - are the most usual fossils to find, but we occasionally come across other remains such as eggs or impressions of skin. Skeletons are only rarely found complete and it is difficult to piece together the fragments to reconstruct a whole animal.
In order to work out what dinosaurs were like in life we need to use the knowledge we already have about today's animals. By understanding how the skeletons of modern creatures reflect their way of life, we can begin to piece together the clues dinosaurs left behind them.
Dinosaurs were reptiles but they varied enormously in size, shape and lifestyle. Nevertheless, they all had some characteristics in common: they all lived on land, could not fly and walked on straight legs tucked underneath their bodies. Some of the best known dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus were aggressive meat eaters, but many more were placid vegetarians that browsed the countryside in herds. Some could sprint away from attackers, while others had their own form of protection. For example, Triceratops were massively protected by an array of horns and spikes while Euoplocephalus was armour plated and wielded a vicious tail club.
There is still a good deal of argument about why dinosaurs became extinct so suddenly about 65 million years ago. Some very imaginative theories have been suggested. One of the most believable suggests that the world's climate changed suddenly - perhaps as a result of a massive meteorite striking the Earth - and that the dinosaurs were not able to adapt quickly enough to the new conditions. But there are other plausible ideas and the debate continues. However the dinosaurs do not, having been replaced by mammals. They leave as their closest descendants, the birds, which probably evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs.
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