They may have been dead for 65 million years, but the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi still appear to be scuffling in the brutal cycle of life.
Two skeletal Tyrannosauruses – one of them called Stan – are frozen in battle over the remains of a Triceratops. Sauropods crane their long necks, as if reaching for the topmost leaves of towering trees. A menacing fish's mouth is agape, a split second away from snapping its sharp teeth on a spindly-shelled turtle. The skies are dominated by Pterosaurs, peering for prey.
This scenographic approach, devised with a storyteller’s sensibility, runs through the museum, which opens to visitors on Saturday. It tells a story that spans 13.8 billion years, crossing through time and space.
“A museum is about theatre,” says Phillip Manning, the new attraction's director of science. “You're telling a story. Every single object in this building tells a story. If we can aid the way you tell that story, wonderful.”
The museum instils wonder from its atrium, where the sauropod skeletons are displayed. While the exterior architecture – by Mecanoo – has long been the subject of fascination, rising in the Saadiyat Cultural District in shapes that echo rock formations, the interior is just as awe-inspiring. Sunlight streams through deep, pentagonal and square wells, illuminating the space naturally during the day. There is a cafe and gift shop by the atrium, the latter selling educational materials, children’s books and plush toys of dinosaurs and whales.
The museum’s galleries are located below. The experience starts with the beginning of the universe, but before stepping into this cosmic genesis, visitors cross a space speckled with the stars in the night sky as it was on December 2, 1971 – when the UAE was founded.
Visitors then head into the Big Bang when, as the digital wall literature explains, “In a split second, the building blocks of all matter were formed.”
An embodiment of these early moments of the universe is the Murchison meteorite.
What initially seems like an unassuming piece of rock holds clues about the conditions and processes of the early universe. The meteorite is 4.6 billion years old, the same age as our solar system. It contains grains from about seven billion years ago, traces of stars that exploded long before our solar system formed.
The Murchison meteorite is the first display in the gallery. The museum is home to “the largest exhibition of meteorites in the Middle East and one of the top displays of meteorites in the world”, says Ludovic Ferriere, curator of geology and meteorites.
The Murchison meteorite definitely inspires the imagination, but it is not the most visibly impressive specimen in the first gallery. That honour goes to the pallasites. These stony-iron meteorites are renowned for their olivine crystals, which glow like embers in the museum lighting. They are rare, making up less than one per cent of discovered meteorites, and are believed to come from the depths of destroyed planets or large asteroids.
One of the most impressive pallasites on display weighs 650kg and was once on display at Nasa's Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre in Houston. “It is the largest piece of such a pallasite,” Ferriere says.
There is a display of Martian meteorites, rocks that formed on the Red Planet and were blasted into space by an impact, before surviving their plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere and finally landing on the surface of our planet.
But perhaps most impressive is a fragment of the Moon that visitors can touch. “It is one of the largest pieces of the Moon, a 45.8kg piece,” Ferriere says. “It is sourced from Libya and has just arrived.”
Slippery and cold, the rock feels unlike anything from Earth. Placing a palm against its surface is a surreal and giddy experience.
From here on, the museum begins investigating the beginnings of life on our planet. The exhibition delineates how “life started producing oxygen around 3.5 billion years ago,” pumping enough for the next billion years to change the planet’s chemistry and creating the banded iron formations we can now find in ancient ocean rocks.
This area is replete with fossils, some of which look otherworldly. The displays have brass inscriptions on the ground revealing how many millions of years the fossils date back. The section concludes with The Great Dying, when most marine and land species perished. The event took place 252 million years ago and is deemed the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history. However, it did clear the way for increasing biodiversity.
The next gallery enters this phase, the Mesozoic Era. This covers some 186 million years, segmented into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
It is in this section that we find the dinosaurs, roaming, scavenging and fighting – and, most of all, growing with each period. “Ecological pressure and sexual selection helped push this growth,” Manning says. “As your plant eaters get bigger, so too do the predators. Otherwise, the predators can't do their job, and you get this arms race, literally, between predator and prey.”
The dramatic flair with which the bones have been assembled helps convey the tension of this period. Every scene has been constructed with rigorous scientific backing, using clues left on the bones themselves, such as bite marks revealing causes of death or fractures that tell a story.
“Just weaving those together is actually really tough to do,” Manning says. “Because you're choreographing skeletons which come often from different parts, or different suppliers, and you're having to work out how they will fit together in a public display.”
There is one display that Manning treasures the most, featuring two Deinonychuses closing in on their prey, a Tenontosaurus. The scene was inspired by an image by Raul Martin, a Spanish illustrator specialising in paleoart, or artworks related to palaeontology.
“He did a beautiful pen and ink of two deinonychuses attacking a Tenontosaurus. The image inspired me 25 years ago,” Manning says. “I was able to recreate that moment here, which makes me very happy. I can't wait for Raul to see that image. He'll hopefully cry a little bit because I did when I saw his painting. So it's about emotion. We want to get people feeling that moment.”
The meteorite that killed off the dinosaurs is represented at the end of the gallery with long light rods that plummet towards the gallery floor in a blazing blue and orange glow. From then on, the museum begins to encroach on our time, most fascinatingly recreating Abu Dhabi's Al Dhafra region seven million years ago.
The gallery shows several life-size models of animals that once inhabited the emirate. From grazing four-tusked elephants to sabre-toothed cats leaping towards an ancestor of the gazelle, these display also seem full of life.
Finally, the museum explores today's world, and it does so in wonderful depth, covering global biomes, including the African savannah, as well as local environments, from the desert and the coast to the mountains.
The display that seems impossible to ignore is the 25-metre skeleton of a female blue whale. The piece is so large that a wall had to be knocked down and rebuilt for it to be installed in the gallery.
A section on the future, emphasising the need for environmentally conscious attitudes and practices to protect the planet and its biodiversity, will reportedly be ready when the museum opens on Saturday.
