Five Dippy Dino Facts

Video caption, Dippy the Dinosaur goes on tour

Dippy the Diplodocus at London's Natural History Museum is a legend, and now he's going on tour.

From 5th January 2017, the dinosaur will be taken apart piece by piece and cleaned, before visiting museums around the UK.

A huge blue whale skeleton will take his place in the Museum's main Hintze Hall.

Watch our video to find out if Dippy will be visiting a museum near you!

So in case you miss him while he gets dismantled and packed away, here's five Dippy Dino Facts to keep you going

  • Dippy is 109 years old and has been in the Natural History Museum's entrance hall since 1979.
  • Dippy is made up of 292 individual bones and arrived in London 36 packing cases.
  • Dippy isn't a real skeleton, he's a plaster cast of a Diplodocus found by railroad workers in Wyoming, USA in 1898. At the time newspapers billed the discovery as the "most colossal animal ever on Earth"
  • The Diplodocus species lived sometime between 156 and 145 million years ago and belongs to a group called sauropods, meaning 'lizard feet'
  • There are 10 versions of replicas like Dippy in museums around the world, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow.