Year 10 Art students went to the Natural History Museum, expecting to spend the day sketching, looking at skeletons, and feeling intellectual. And for a while, that’s exactly what we did.

We wandered through halls crammed with all the usual delights, taxidermy animals locked in eternal, slightly baffled poses, gleaming skeletons of creatures that definitely looked better with skin, and endless glass cases full of beetles. Along the way, we saw incredible photographs, close-ups of bugs that looked like alien war machines, birds frozen mid-flight, the kind of images that make you suddenly aware of how badly designed human beings are. 

Naturally, we tried to capture some of this in our sketchbooks. Some of us focused on the grand drama of antlers and wings. Others attempted the eerie stillness of taxidermy. Some of us just ended up with angry, scribbled pigeons. But it’s the effort that counts. 

Then came the surprise, an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the museum’s specimen labs.

If you’ve never been inside a museum’s collection rooms, imagine stepping into a hidden world of jars. Endless shelves of them, each one holding something that was once alive, now floating in preserving fluid like it’s stuck halfway between life and a ghost story.

The fish were mesmerising. Their scales caught the light in a way that made them look almost opalescent, their fins fanned out like delicate fabric. Without movement, without context, they became something else entirely—just pure form and structure, the stripped-down elegance of nature.

Then there was the fish that had the sheer audacity to reappear after being declared extinct. A coelacanth, a species scientists were absolutely convinced had died out 66 million years ago—back when dinosaurs were still stomping around. And then, in 1938, one just casually turned up off the coast of South Africa, alive and well, as if the last few epochs had been a minor inconvenience.

It was discovered by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who, with a name like that, should either be solving murders or running an empire. She was actually a museum curator who absolutely deserves more credit than she gets. She knew the fish was important the moment she saw it, she fought to get it recognised, and basically upended everything scientists thought they knew about evolution. Which is no small feat!

But the real show stealer, though, was the fish, just swimming along like nothing had happened. A living fossil. A prehistoric relic that completely ignored science’s attempts to write its obituary. Proof that nature does whatever it wants, no matter how many textbooks we publish about it.

What started as an art trip became something else entirely. We came expecting to study nature, but really, the museum just proved that nature has been making art long before we showed up.