Dippy's Departure

A museum’s famous 112-year-old dinosaur is set to leave London for a national tour.

18:19 05 January 2017

112-year-old Dippy the diplodocus is set to leave the Natural History Museum in Kensington later this year for a two-year national tour. The 70ft long plaster-cast sauropod replica will be dismantled on Thursday and will be replaced by the skeleton of an 83ft female blue whale, which is also more than 100 years old.

 

The tour will start in 2018, with Dorset County Museum set to be the first stop from February to May.

 

Dippy is cast from a diplodocus specimen found in America in 1898 and was unveiled to the public in 1905. It was named Diplodocus Carnegii in honour of its owner, Scottish-born millionaire businessman Andrew Carnegie, who commissioned a replica of the dinosaur. Dippy is one of the 10 replicas of the original Diplodocus carnegii in museums around the world.