'Hope' the blue whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum, London

'Hope' the blue whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum, London

Meet Hope, the blue whale. Suspended from the Victorian ceiling of Hintze Hall, the jaw-dropping specimen dives towards you when you walk through the front door of London's Natural History Museum. The 25.2-metre female blue whale skeleton was first displayed in the museum's Mammal Hall in 1934, over 40 years after washing up on a beach in Wexford, Ireland. But since 2017, the marine mammal has taken over from Dippy, the much-loved Diplodocus dinosaur, as the museum's centrepiece, giving visitors the opportunity to walk underneath the largest animal on Earth.