Fern the dinosaur takes centre stage at London Natural History Museum's newly revamped gardens

The Natural History Museum in London is set to open its newly revamped gardens, a five-year project costing £25 million (€29.7m), located just outside its main entrance.

Among the highlights of the gardens is Fern, a magnificent 26-metre-long bronze cast of a Dippy the diplodocus, the museum’s much-loved centrepiece and who is currently on a national tour.

"It's a bronze replica of Dippy, the diplodocus who used to grace the Natural History Museum Central hall," says Professor Susannah Maidment, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum.

Dippy is very much an indoor dinosaur, but in bronze Fern will brave the elements and is now a permanent fixture at the museum.

“The diplodocus is a big herbivore. This one is 22m long, and it spans four metres at the hips. So it's one of the biggest animals ever to walk the earth and it lived in the upper Jurassic period about 150 million years ago," says Maidment.

The Jurassic landscape surrounding Fern is one of two new gardens that now occupy the five acres of land surrounding the museum.

The first is the Evolution Garden where visitors will walk through 2.7 billion years of the history of our planet. It is a timeline of the rock formations which have formed through the Earth’s violent past and opens out into a wider green space.

Palaeontologist Dr Paul Kenrick, the principle researcher at the Natural History Museum says: “Visitors will be walking through geological time, starting with the oldest rocks in the UK, which are over 2.7 billion years old. And as we walk through the garden we come to the Cambrian period and then the scale of the garden is calibrated - one metre equals five million years. So you'll be walking at that sort of pace through the garden experiencing geological