Pocket Number 24: Herbert Museum

Dippy the dinosaur is a life-size, replica of a Diplodocus Carnegii skeleton. It has appeared in the main foyer of Coventry’s Herbert Museum and is on a three year loan from the Natural History Museum.

I booked myself for the 360 Dip-E VR experience. However, instead of Dippy, it featured Coventry’s yet-to-be-named Ichthyosaur, found in a quarry in nearby Warwickshire. It was put on display next to Dippy alongside other Jurassic sea fossils.

I learned the Ichthyosaur skull was discovered in Harbury Cement Quarry; also that hundreds of million of years ago, the spot on our planet which is now Coventry was submersed beneath the Jurassic sea.

I further learned that Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles. They lived in the sea and came to the surface for air.

At the entrance to the VR experience I encountered Felicity. She checked my ticket and then helped me get started with the VR headset

I explained about what I was doing and Felicity gave to the montage a brochure advertising the Coventry Biennial 2023. She told me that the photograph on the brochure is a bird’s eye view of the seabird filled Chincha Island off the coast of Peru. She said the photograph is from a film installation shown in the biennial, from artist Dinh Q. Lê.

The film installation is called ‘the Colony’ and is shot from various perspectives: from boat, drone – and also up close, on the ground, where labourers harvesting the valuable guano by hand is shown – extremely difficult and backbreaking work.

Researching later, I learned a more about history of guano, which is a natural fertilizer used in farming prior to the discovery of chemical fertilizers.

I learned that given its dry climate, Peruvian guano from the desolate guano islands is considered to be guano of the best quality and was an extremely important Peruvian export in the 19th century, to the extent that it started wars and was called Peru’s ‘white gold’.