Is it right to retire Dippy, the Natural History Museum's famous diplodocus?

I should be in a lather.

Dippy the famous Diplodocus at the Natural History Museum in London is to be retired. This is something I had not anticipated.

“In 1979, Britain’s Dippy settled in to its current location - the museum’s grand central hall,” I wrote a couple of years ago in a post about Dippy. “It is now so established (even tweeting regularly @NHM_Dippy) it’s hard to imagine it will ever move again. It would cause an uproar.”

How wrong I was. Rather than being outraged by the news that Dippy is to walk, I find myself unexpectedly excited.

“This is an important and necessary change,” says Michael Dixon, director of the Natural History Museum, in press release issued this morning. The dinosaur cast is due to be replaced, in 2017, by the blue whale skeleton that currently hangs in the Mammal Hall.

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“As the largest known animal to have ever lived on Earth, the story of the blue whale reminds us of the scale of our responsibility to the planet,” says Dixon. “This makes it the perfect choice of specimen to welcome and capture the imagination of our visitors, as well as marking a major transformation of the Museum.”

I met and interviewed Dixon back in 2011 for an opinion piece I wrote for Nature on the future of natural history museums. Attendance figures at the museum have been rising steadily over the past several years, an increase that probably has something to do with the museum’s success at pushing itself into mainstream life (e.g. through television documentaries like Museum of Life and David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive or, most recently, in the movie Paddington). But Dixon also felt that issues like climate change, loss of biodiversity, energy, and food and water security have resulted in a significant shift in the way people are engaging with the natural world. “I think the public are just getting more and more interested in these issues,” he said. “Somewhere like this is somewhere they can learn about it from a place that has a reputation for being independent and objective.”

As is the case for any institution, it must move with the times to stay relevant and the transformation of the entrance hall is just the latest in a series of spectacular and successful transitions that the Natural History Museum has made over the last two decades. I will, of course, be sorry to see the back of Dippy, but he has had a good 35 years in the limelight and I am ready for something new. “As we build new galleries, we will try to build our science into the stories that those galleries tell,” Dixon said in 2011.

The whale is expected to be in place in the Hintze Hall (as the central gallery is now known) some time in 2017. I am not uproarious after all. I can’t wait.