Nature's Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art & Invention

Harnessing technology and inspired by nature's amazing design concepts, the exhibition Nature's Toolbox helps understand and appreciate the life-or-death interdependence between the 10-20 million species on earth and the quality of the environment we share. "Many people still don't realize how much our very lives depend on the biodiversity of plants, animals, and everything else," says curator Randy Jayne Rosenberg. The purpose of the exhibition is to show that humans aren't just part of the problem but also the solution. In 2009 Professor Lucy Orta took an expedition to the Peruvian Amazon, together with her partner Jorge and scientists from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. Inspired by this incredible experience, and drawing on research at the Natural History Museum in London, Orta realised the Amazonia Collection: Aepyornis, Gallimimus, Allosaurus, Pelaeomastodon. The porcelain fossils cast from the Museum’s collection evoke the cycles of life and death, fragile, tender and precious: the egg from the elephant bird Aepyornis, the limb bones from dinosaurs Gallimimus and Allosaurus and the elephant ancestor Palaeomastodon. The enamel flowers, butterflies and insects that populate these sculptures point to the beauty and wealth of our planet and the specimens that simply disappear before being discovered or so tiny to go unnoticed