Tyson's Pygmy

Actually I'm only in the Natural History Museum because I want to use their loo. I spent the latter half of the morning trying and failing to get to Waterloo, so half way home I was bursting.

This little fellow is actually a young chimpanzee who was injured and then died on a boat journey from Africa to England in 1698.

The body was finally given to a physician called Edward Tyson who used the skeleton to theorise about links between chimps and human pygmies. All this 200 years before Darwin.

I'd never noticed him before, tucked away in a little corner of the main hall. Just see what you find when you take your eye off the dinosaur.