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The museum’s extensive collection of gemstones, rocks and minerals includes the brilliant red Rhodochrosite from the USA. The Earth’s Treasury Gallery investigates how quartz keeps time and how carbon becomes diamonds.

The Power Within looks at volcanoes and earthquakes. You can stand in a Japanese supermarket and experience the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

Approach the Earth galleries by an escalator that travels through a giant globe. The model is made of iron, zinc and copper to symbolize the Earth’s composition.

Perhaps the most hair-raising display is housed in No. 1 Crawley House, a gallery which shows just how many of the 1.3 million known kinds of arthropods, or creepy-crawlies, share our homes.

A giant model of an unborn baby in the Human Biology galleries explores the sounds we hear in the womb. Other hands-on exhibits test abilities and reactions and show how physical characteristics are inherited.

A semi-spherical video wall in the Ecology Gallery shows the water cycle and how it links all life on the planet. A walk-through leaf shows how plants make oxygen.

Marine reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs have survived in some remarkable fossils, such as the pregnant femaleIchthyosaur , found in a Dorset garden, which lived 187–178 million years ago.

Opened in 2003, this new wing gives visitors access to the priceless specimen collection gathered since 1753 from all corners of the earth. The fascinating Spirit Collection is made up of over 22 million specimens preserved in 450,000 jars.

Deinonychus , one of the museums impressively life-like animatronic models, lurches and roars in this hugely popular gallery. More traditional exhibits of fossilized skeletons and eggs are also on display.

A 150-m (490-ft) borehole drilled beneath the museum reveals its fascinating contents in the Earth galleries, where fossil fuels and renewable energy sources are explored.