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I had a coup today. Sort of. There are several people I’d like to talk to who were at the Natural History Museum when Chi Chi the giant panda arrived from London Zoo in the summer of 1972. I have

I spent yesterday at the wonderful library of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, where I’d ordered up several interesting-looking folders from the archives. I’ve seen one of them before – a ream of correspondence relating to the taxidermy

It’s a remarkable fact that the formal scientific discovery of the giant panda – an animal that seems so familiar today – took place as recently as 1869. But before that, humans must have encountered pandas and there may be