Natural History Museum

When architect Alfred Waterhouse designed the Natural History Museum, opened in 1881, he embedded a scientific argument directly into the terracotta tiles: extinct species, pterodactyls, sabre-toothed cats, decorate the east wing, while living creatures adorn the west. This wasn’t mere whimsy. Sir Richard Owen, who coined the word ‘dinosaur’ and championed the museum’s creation, opposed Darwin’s theory linking past and present species. So he insisted they be kept apart, even in the architecture.

Owen got his way almost everywhere in the building except, allegedly, in the monkey house. Among the dozens of primates carved into the terracotta, several are said to wear faces suspiciously close to Darwin’s own, a joke apparently smuggled past a client who spent the rest of the building trying to keep Darwin’s ideas at arm’s length. Owen never lived to see evolution win the argument he’d built into brick and clay. The species stayed sorted by wing exactly as he demanded, extinct to the east, living to the west, a floor plan built to resist a theory that the building’s own visitors would spend the next century confirming.