An amazing weekend of fun and fungi at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow

Glasgow will be saying farewell to Dippy the Dinosaur on May 6. He's had a HUGE impact on everyone who's seen him, and it'll be very sad to say goodbye. But before he's off, there's another weekend of wild fun planned, and Dippy will be joined by a giant fungus, while Glasgow takes on the world as part of the City Nature Challenge 2019! Fiona Weir tells us more...

All too soon, we will be saying goodbye to our dear friend Dippy the Diplococcus. We have had the pleasure of Dippy’s company as a guest in our fair city for the last four months hosted at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Dippy has been visited by over a million people and will move on to Newcastle Museum.

Dippy was first discovered in 1897 in Canon Colorado and Scot Andrew Carnegie acquired the skeleton in 1898. Carnegie agreed to donate a cast to the Natural History Museum in London as a gift. Dippy reminds us of our time on Earth. With the world continually changing, he helps us to look back and understand more about species’ evolution and extinction. Dippy highlights how life is precious and flashes by in an instant. We are a speck on this ever-changing world and what we do now to preserve it and its amazing breadth of life, should be at the forefront of all our minds.

Dippy will be leaving us on May 6, and we’ll be celebrating his departure with our Dippy Nature Discovery weekend (April 26-29) partnered with the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens. We will celebrate Dippy with a bioblitz and the arrival of ‘Fiona the Fungus’ a large-scale installation which will sit in between the London plain trees at the back of the Kelvingrove Museum for this weekend only. Over the weekend, Fiona and her team of mycologists from Kew Gardens will highlight this microscopic world and the number of species we have yet to understand and identify. So why not come along and meet Fiona and learn all about the fascinating world of fungi.

Fiona the Fungus glows in the dark just as some fungi in the natural world do - picture courtesy of Grow Wild

As part of the weekend, we will also be running a bioblitz in Kelvingrove Park. This is part of the City Nature Challenge which will be taking place in cities around the world on the same weekend, and there will be wildlife walks and talks and opportunities to identify and count all the different species found in Kelvingrove Park. You can also take part in your own garden in Glasgow. https://www.bnhc.org.uk/bioblitz/city-nature-challenge/

On Sunday 28 April RSPB, Kew Gardens and the Nature City Challenge Network will be joined by over 10 other partners made up of environmental organisations, community groups and NGOs from Glasgow, to celebrate all the species that can be found in the park and its surrounding green spaces. With cities from around the world we want to find and to highlight the number of species that can be found in our green spaces and your backyard!

The Nature Discovery Weekend runs from Friday 26 to Monday 29, but the bioblitz will be held on Sunday 28 only. You can join in on Twitter through following @RSPBGlasgow or using #Glasgowwildfest #CityNatureChallenge