When in London

go to the Natural History Museum. The outside alone is worth the effort: enough carved creatures and gargoyles to make a cathedral sick with envy. Then you get inside and you're looking right up the fossilized hooter of a diplodocus. Its skeleton fills most of the enormous entrance hall. In 2009, the NHM will host an exhibition on Darwin, which is currently pulling in crowds at the American Museum of Natural History. The NHM shop is worth a visit, but at the risk of damage to your wallet. One book that caught my eye was Inside the Beagle with Charles Darwin, an illustrated book for kids 8 and older. An excellent book to have in a primary school or around a home. It's not listed in the NHM shops online catalogue, but details from Amazon here.

hms beagle, charles darwin, natural history museum london

Charles Darwin: not always bearded.

Darren Naish, blogger and Doctor of theropod dinosaurs (which in my book makes him a Ph.D. of Th.D.) makes the point here. The iconic image of Darwin is the bearded old man. We do much the same on our site using the hirsuit old Darwin here. He was bare-chinned both in 1831 when he stepped aboard the Beagle and in 1859 when he published the Origin of Species. Darren calls Darwin: 'the most important biologist of all time', and says that portraying him as an old man, 'is annoying and misleading, and perpetuated by a society that seems to want scientists to be oddballs that operate on the fringes of society.'

A primary teacher relative says something similar: ask children to draw a scientist you inevitably get a wild-haired Einstein-alike. My recent visits to labs like the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg showed plenty of smart, bright young things quite unlike wild-haired or bald and bearded geriatrics. If we're to recruit young people into science as a career, these are stereotypes we need to challenge. We are admonished: younger and less hairy Darwins will be appearing on the site shortly.

charles darwin, science, beards, hms beagle