Sir Patrick Vallance is sitting in a back office at the Natural History Museum talking about his childhood love of dinosaurs. “I was obsessed,” says the UK’s former chief scientific adviser from behind his trademark tortoiseshell glasses. “When I was young, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I failed at that so I did something else,” he says.
His favourite exhibit as a boy? “Dippy the diplodocus in the hall was definitely one that inspired me. The whale, too. When I walk around now, I think about the meteorites and what that’s telling us about outer space.”
