As visitors walk through the new Evolution Garden at the Natural History Museum in London, they will journey through 540 million years of shifting ecosystems in 15 minutes. Every yard or so, they will leap forward five million years, from Cambrian seas swarming with trilobites to Jurassic forests dominated by dinosaurs to the palm-fringed tropical England of the Paleocene Epoch.
This immersive experience aims to widen the lens through which visitors view life, preparing them for the museum’s exhibits that explore Earth’s deep history.
“What you see outside in the world is just a snapshot of a much bigger story,” said Paul Kenrick, a principal researcher at the museum, in a video interview. “The garden is about coming to grips with the scale of geologic time and the enormity of change that has happened.”
This outdoor gallery is just as focused on the future as it is on the past. It is part of a revamped five-acre green space that opened in July after a two-year redesign. And it will become one of the most intensely studied urban environments in the world. Working with the community, the museum’s researchers will wield the latest technologies — including devices that can record sound inside trees or vacuum DNA from the air — to help wildlife thrive in cities.
The Evolution Garden begins at the exit of the London Underground’s South Kensington station, where many of the free museum’s 5.6 million annual visitors arrive. There, the garden designers built a ramp flanked by multicolored strata of ancient stones, creating the sensation that guests are emerging into a canyon. People can trace their fingers along Britain’s oldest rocks, including gray and pink gneiss, quarried from the Outer Hebrides islands of Scotland and nearly three billion years old.
Soon, brass inlays of sea creatures appear on the rocks and pavement, illustrating the surge in oceanic life during what is known as the Cambrian explosion. From this seascape, guests will climb steps to the “Moving to Land” section, mimicking the upward path of the first aquatic animals to clamber ashore. In this area, garden curators are trying to cultivate mosses and liverworts, which are similar to the original land plants but difficult to grow in today’s drier conditions. That is one of the challenges of distilling deep time into a single space: Most early species are extinct and evolved to interact with ecosystems of eons past, which fluctuated from tropical to glacial.
Understanding those interactions is part of the garden experience. In the section on the Carboniferous Period, Australian tree ferns and horsetails act as miniature stand-ins for their massive ancestors. With the help of signs and an audio guide, visitors can learn how these swampy fern forests created the coal we burn today. This lush vegetation also pumped out so much oxygen that insects and other creatures swelled to enormous sizes, like the six-foot-long millipede seen in a brass inlay along the trail.
Next, rust-colored volcanic rock and Permian sandstone depict the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out as much as 90 percent of life on Earth more than 200 million years ago. Creatures that evolved later included dinosaurs like Diplodocus, represented here by Fern, a life-size bronze skeleton looming above the rocks. (Fern is a copy of the plaster Diplodocus that served as the museum’s interior centerpiece from 1979 to 2017.) To evoke Jurassic forests, the designers planted Wollemi pine and monkey puzzle trees — evergreens that were indeed dinosaurs’ contemporaries.
After passing through other primeval ecosystems, the path ends with the appearance of human footprints, along with a quotation in bronze from the British naturalist David Attenborough: “The future of the natural world, on which we all depend, is in our hands.” This thought hangs in the air as visitors proceed to the grasslands, woodland and ponds of the Nature Discovery Garden, another redesigned attraction. These green spaces, which provide habitat for more than 3,200 species, serve as living laboratories for scientific research that addresses some of the most pressing planetary emergencies.
Throughout the gardens, researchers are installing acoustic sensors that will monitor nocturnal bird migrations and track insects buzzing between plants. Under the soil, the sensors will register worms wriggling and traffic noises vibrating. In algae-slicked ponds, they will eavesdrop on newts swimming and aquatic plants releasing air bubbles. Sensors wrapped around trees will record water flowing through the trunks and beetle larvae munching on wood.
Museum researchers will also collect environmental DNA: genetic material shed by creatures from their skin, feces, mucus and more. Scientists can scoop this material, known as eDNA, from the water, scrape it from plants and soil, and even suck it from the air with a device that Matt Clark, a research leader at the museum, helped develop. Using bioacoustic sensors and eDNA, researchers can identify which species live in and pass through these gardens. They can pick up fungal pathogens blowing in on the wind. And they can measure the health of the gardens’ ecosystems before and after the redesign, and as the flora and fauna proliferate.
Gathering such real-time evidence is critical for conservation, said John Tweddle, the head of the museum’s center for British biodiversity, in a video interview. “Governments need to be able to track, against biodiversity targets, whether conservation efforts are working,” he said. “Community groups are interested in knowing, ‘Is our gardening helping wildlife?’” Other organizations could then use this data as evidence that urban gardens can benefit nature, Tweddle added.
These studies could also generate ideas for mitigating harms to biodiversity in built environments. For example, the museum’s researchers worked with schoolchildren ages 11 to 14 to create a community science project called Nature Overheard. They asked people around the country to send in recordings of road noise, along with sounds of insect populations, which they combined with similar recordings from the museum gardens. The results, expected next spring, will measure the impact of noise pollution on insects and could offer clues for redesigning roadside greenery to benefit pollinators.
Community involvement is a key aspect of the museum gardens’ mission. The public will be invited to participate in biodiversity measurements by taking field surveys, collecting water samples from ponds and using apps that feed observations into the museum’s database. It is part of a new ethos, Tweddle said, that asks, “How, as a museum, can we make our towns and cities a better place for nature and people?”
“Cities have to work for the people and nature together,” he added. “We’ve gone so far down the ‘make it work for people’ route, we’ve got a long way to go to rebalance so that nature is flourishing.”
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