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

© Brian Doben

'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.