So long, Dippy: museum's blue whale seeks to inspire love of living world

Natural History Museum in London signals urgency of wildlife crisis by replacing dinosaur centrepiece with species alive today

In the hot summer of 1976, when Richard Sabin was 10, he went on a trip with his Birmingham primary school to the Natural History Museum in London. Blown away by the scale of what he was seeing, the wide-eyed schoolboy was told by an attendant that if he wanted to see something really big he should make his way to the mammal hall, where the skeletons of a number of whales, including an enormous blue whale, were displayed.

"Another gallery attendant went past, and I stopped her and said, 'Are these real?'" recalls Sabin. "And she said, 'Yes they are. They're the real skeletons of animals that still live in our oceans today.' That was the sentence that really grabbed me and carried me away. I didn't know what to make of what I was seeing. I was transfixed."