Context!

Dinosaurs are the single best thing ever to exist and anyone who claims otherwise is lying to themselves. Wollaton Hall, despite being a major natural history museum, sadly doesn’t have any on permanent display. However they’ve been rectifying this with temporary exhibits showing dinosaur skeletons from other museums.

Back in 2018, the museum held a huge “Dinosaurs of China” exhibit, where skeletons were sent from the Beijing Paleontology Museum and Chongqing Museum and were crammed into a building very much not designed for them. It was a really novel idea and I went to see them several times, back when I had a really blurry phone camera and long before I had the idea to start a blog.

This exhibition was apparently successful enough that the local council invested in a follow-up – Titus: T-Rex Is King. As you may have guessed, this time an entire Tyrannosaurus has made its way to the Hall! The event has actually been going for a long time, but despite being basically in my back garden I’ve never gotten round to going until now?? However my friend and I eventually got our lives sorted out to the point that we arranged a sunny Saturday to go see it.

While we were there we also found that some major changes had been made to the rest of the museum!! I’ll talk a bit about those too later on.

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What It’s Like – The Titus Exhibition 🦖

Wollaton Hall is normally free to enter, so the temporary £12 entry charge (or £8.75 if you have a student card 😇) to the exhibition does sting a bit. The website implies you have to book online but you don’t!!! Providing there’s space you can just turn up like we did and buy your tickets at the desk.

The dinosaur exhibit itself is mostly on the upper floor. The downstairs rooms, with their gorgeous Edwardian taxidermy, have been largely left alone – although I noticed that some of the animals have been moved around. These bird dioramas haven’t been touched since I was a kid and I never get tired of looking at them. It’s something about the little worlds they capture, frozen in time forever.

But we’re not here to look at birds!!!! Heading upstairs and turning right, we followed the signage until we were suddenly greeted by the star of the exhibition – Titus himself.

And it’s… what you’d expect! A big dinosaur! I took a few selfies with it because I’m the most basic white woman alive, and then we got talking to a guide who showed us where the real bones of the skeleton were.

…Wait, real bones?

So… yeah. Here’s where things got odd. It was only when the guide was pointing out the “actual” bones that we realised that most of the skeleton we were looking at wasn’t an actual fossil. This was a bit of a surprise as the marketing for the exhibition had said several times that Titus is the first “real” Tyrannosaurus to be displayed in the UK in over a century (as in not a cast but the actual fossils).

Naturally we expected some of the bones to be reconstructions – that’s just how fossils work, complete skeletons are incredibly rare – but it turns out that Titus is basically another cast skeleton with a handful of bones replaced by real ones. A tooth here, two of the neck vertebrae there. A bit of its left foot. The guide helpfully pointed out all the ‘real’ bones out with a laser pointer.

The guide told us that about 20% of the skeleton was real fossils, but it only seemed about half that – to the point where I’m not sure what the point of even mounting the handful of bones on the cast skeleton actually was. It’s still an impressive specimen, don’t get me wrong! But it seems very cheeky to imply that Titus was a real skeleton when it… mostly isn’t. It’s like fusing scraps of the Titanic to a cruise ship and saying you’ve brought back the original vessel.

The main room of the exhibition is naturally dominated by the 12 metre long Tyrannosaurus skeleton, so the rest of the exhibit is shuttled off to wherever they could fit it. The adjoining room has a small display on how the dinosaur was excavated, plus some skeletons of plesiosaurs dug up in the local area (Nottinghamshire was mostly underwater during the Mesozoic, so we don’t have many actual dinosaurs to call our own).

As a sidenote – the guide we spoke to said that Wollaton Hall is trying to acquire some Icthyosaur skeletons recently discovered in Rutland county for a future display at the museum. Apparently this is much to the chagrin of Rutland County Council, who I think really want something to distinguish themselves as a county, now that they’re no longer the only English county without a McDonald’s.

Across the hall, a small room adjoined to the mammal area (with its beautiful savannah dioramas) has been opened up and turned into an activity hub. Most of these involve using AR tracking to do dinosaur-related activities, like exploring the muscle systems of a virtual Tyrannosaurus or customising your very own Titus. I abused this as far as possible by creating a beast that would curse its own existence.

the problem is that they use something similar to the Microsoft Kinect to track your hand movements – and neither of us could get them to work properly! There’s no buttons to press – I wonder if this was a Covid measure? The Titus exhibit did open up back in September, when covid measures were a lot stricter – they might have wanted to avoid visitors actually touching anything. But unfortunately it made actually interacting with these activity stations nearly impossible. It’s really unfortunate.

There’s a photo opp in the next room, if you really want to stick your head in a fake dinosaur, but that’s essentially the end of the Titus exhibit.

OR IS IT

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What it’s Like – The Other New Galleries 🦍

I’m not sure if this was done to coincide with the Titus exhibition, but Wollaton Hall has also completely revamped two other rooms in the museum. Walking across the stairway led us to a room that used to be a geology gallery many moons ago – after being weirdly empty for a few years, this room has finally been revamped with a theme of prehistory. And it’s really good!!!

Sadly there’s no skeletons to gawk at (it’s not a huge room), but the museum staff have collected all sorts of smaller artifacts and thoughtfully arranged them roughly in chronological order, from igneous rocks representing the pre-Cambrian through to mammoth teeth that date back a few thousand years. Also the Mosasaurus head is now properly displayed, instead of sitting awkwardly in an empty corner.

I hadn’t expected this at all and was really impressed by the job they’ve done! Previously the museum’s fossils had been either in storage or awkwardly scattered around the museum, soseeing them collected in a much more coherent gallery was really cool. There’s even a meteorite to look at. I really commend the museum staff for putting such a modern exhibit together in a really tight space.

The final room is a mostly dedicated to mammals, with an overall theme of conservation. Like the prehistory room it’s small but very dense! George the Gorilla has been moved here, wedding tackle still intact. I noticed some new objects were now on display, like some casts of a dodo’s head, a red panda and even an orang-utan. It’s not radically different from previous natural history displays they’ve had, but I appreciate how fresh it all felt.

And that’s basically everything new, as far as we could see? Eventually we headed down to the gift shop. Sadly it’s a bit disappointing, there wasn’t much T-rex merchandise to buy! But of a letdown really as I’d been dying for a Tyrannosaurus necklace to wear at my job interview the following week.

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Final Thoughts

A T-rex is a T-rex no matter how much of it is the actual, real fossil. It’s not like looking at replicas of historical artifacts – a dinosaur skeleton made entirely of steel is still going to be really impressive. I think changing the advertising of the Titus exhibition to reflect the fact that it’s (mostly) a replica would have been wiser – as I said before, it’s a bit cheeky that only a few smaller bones made up the skeleton!

One thing I was curious about was how much they’d be able to wring out of the fact that there’s only one skeleton on display, and… my suspicions were mostly correct. It’s a cool skeleton, but even a Tyrannosaurus can only keep your attention for so long. The other distractions are okay but I think it might have been worth having more dinosaurs on display – maybe keep it on theme by having some dinosaurs contemporary to the late Cretaceous. But I appreciate these things are expensive.

Although it’s a bit of a downgrade compared to the ‘Dinosaurs of China’ exhibition from a few years ago, the ‘Titus: T-Rex is King’ exhibition is still worth a look if you have any interest in dinosaurs.

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Highlights 👀

• The T-rex skeleton itself. Even if it’s mostly fake, it’s still undeniably impressive
• The new prehistory gallery is fantastic 😊
• Some of the outdated galleries have finally been refreshed and they look great

Eehh… 🤨

• Even a T-Rex can only keep your attention for so long
• The interactive displays just don’t work as intended
• The gift shop could have used some more interesting stuff to buy beyond mugs and t-shirts

Final rating – 3/5 Tyrannosaurs

🦖🦖🦖

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