I touched 200-million-year-old poo at the London Natural History Museum's new ancient ocean exhibition

For most people, the Jurassic period means one thing: dinosaurs. But during the time that dinosaurs stomped across the land and pterosaurs soared through the skies, deadly marine reptiles were cruising through the ocean, devouring other animals.

The Natural History Museum’s latest exhibition, Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep, brings these ancient sea creatures to life once more. People can see (and even touch) some of these formidable beasts through the exhibits, many of which are on public display for the first time. I was lucky enough to have an early sneak-peek at what's on show.

Visitors are immediately plunged into the prehistoric underwater world. Rippling shadows dance along the room’s deep blue walls from swathes of fabric draped across the ceiling, and dragon-like monsters swoop across huge TV screens.

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There's an enormous amphibian – the size of a crocodile – with a split in its skull. This clue hints at how it may have died: experts think a tree landed on top of it.

Then, there’s the chance to touch the cast of an ichthyosaur skull to get to grips with how massive this creature’s eyes would have been. Its huge peepers gave it the best chance of finding prey in deep, dark waters and, in some specimens, they were massive. This skull is from a nine-metre beastie discovered by 14-year-old Joseph Anning in 1811.

Some ichthyosaurs could grow as long as 25 metres – longer than a tennis court – and their eyes would have been around the size of a dinner plate.

Later, a replica reveals what this ferocious animal would have looked like: a cross between a shark and a dolphin. It thrashed its head from side to side to snap up fish with its long tooth-filled snout. Thanks to preserved soft tissue, experts even know what colour it was. Its streamlined body was a dark grey on top and lighter on its underside. This ‘countershading’ made it harder to see from both above and below, suggesting something even bigger and more terrifying in the water may have wanted to take a bite of it.

Interactive history

While exploring, visitors are invited to touch skull casts and real prehistoric teeth. There’s even the chance to get handsy with a 200-million-year old turd. Thankfully, the coprolite (Jurassic poo) is much less unpleasant than a fresh dung sample.

Perhaps the star of the show is the three-dimensional cast of a plesiosaur that guests can walk around to fully appreciate the impressive length of its elongated neck, which may have enabled the strange creature to sneak up on prey in murky waters.

“We’re used to seeing plesiosaurs laid out flat in slabs with more of a two dimensional pancake-like view,” says Dr Marc Jones, curator of fossil reptiles at the Museum and the exhibition’s lead scientist, speaking of the new exhibitions immersive benefits.

“You can walk all the way around and have a look at it from every different angle.”

Experts once believed that plesiosaurs had flexible necks like a swan, Jones explains, but they’re much more rigid: “When they were first being understood 200 years ago, Reverend Buckland described them as a snake threaded through the body of a turtle.”

These animals are so unlike anything we know on the planet today that they influenced academic understanding of extinction.

“They were a bigger deal than dinosaurs in some ways,” says Jones.

“They have this body plan that just doesn't exist today so this fed directly into discussions of extinction, whether animals could go extinct, and the age of the earth.”

Although these long-extinct beasties seem worlds away from many of the animals in our ocean today, the museum’s curators want guests to recognise the similarities with species that still exist, such as horseshoe crabs and autiluses – both of which have been on the planet for hundreds of millions of years.

Relationships within the food web are similar in today’s ocean: phytoplankton (plant-like plankton) create energy from sunlight and are eaten by small animals. Those are chomped by larger animals and so on, all the way up the food chain to the fiercest apex predators.

“The Triassic and the Jurassic are really a warning to us,” says Jones. Back then, the Earth was much warmer and more humid, the oceans were more than 130 metres deeper than they are today, and there was much more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

“You have a much warmer world because of this CO2 and we've put over 2000 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the space of 200 years,” he says.

There was also much less oxygen in the ocean because of warmer waters and plankton blooms. “There was lots of extinction among vertebrates, and they think it's because of poorly oxygenated waters,” he says.

In the Jurassic period, the environment was changing much more slowly than it is today but many creatures still went extinct.

“Even climate change taking [place over] millions of years has impacts on the ecosystem and the animals that live in it,” says Jones, “so that should tell us something to be wary of: what we're doing to the atmosphere.”

Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep opens May 22nd, 2026

Times: Monday – Sunday 10.00-17.50 (last entry 16.30)   
Prices: Peak: Adult £17.50, child £8.75   
Off-peak: Adult £15.00, child £7.50 
Members, patrons and children under 4 go free 
Concessions available 

Get Tickets: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/jurassic-oceans.html 

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