Dippy the Diplodocus is displaced from Natural History Museum by blue whale

Dippy is leaving the building. After decades of dominating the central hall of the Natural History Museum, starring in movies right up to the recent Paddington, and enthralling generations of schoolchildren who imagined that with one swish of its tail it could take out an entire class and teacher too, the Diplodocus skeleton cast is making way for a whale.

Dippy was cast from original fossil bones discovered in the US in 1898, and has been the first enthralling object most visitors saw at the museum, in South Kensington, London, for the past 35 years, having moved to the central hall in 1979. However, the museum announces today that it will be replaced by a real and even more vast specimen: the skeleton of a blue whale, the largest animal ever known to have lived on earth, brought to the brink of extinction by human hunting.

The whale is one of the earliest specimens acquired by the museum, bought for £250 in 1891, just 10 years after the South Kensington institution opened. The female, already injured by a whaler, died when it beached itself in Wexford harbour mouth in Ireland. It is recorded that the carcass also produced 630 gallons of oil and tonnes of meat, all sold for profit by a merchant in the town.

It has been on display in the mammals gallery since 1938, but will be moved and positioned as if diving from the roof of the central hall, now renamed the Hintze hall in honour of the £5m donation from the millionaire businessman Sir Michael Hintze.

Sir Michael Dixon, director of the museum, said challenging people about the plight of the Earth was part of the museum’s urgent purpose. “The very resources on which modern society relies are under threat. Species and ecosystems are being destroyed faster than we can describe them or even understand their significance. The blue whale serves as a poignant reminder that while abundance is no guarantee of survival, through our choices, we can make a real difference. There is hope.”

Diplodocus, identified as a new type of dinosaur in 1878, lived between 156m and 148m years ago. Dippy has been one of the best-loved pieces in the museum since 1905, when the 292 enormous bone casts of the skeleton arrived at the museum in 36 packing crates.

It was a gift from the Scottish-born businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, made just seven years after the fossil skeleton was found by chance by railway workers in Wyoming. The cast was commissioned after King Edward VII saw an image of the dinosaur in the new museum Carnegie had just opened in Pittsburgh, and dropped a heavy hint that he would like something just like that for the London museum.

Dippy was a party animal from the start, unveiled in a lavish celebration for 300 guests, and has looked down on innumerable product launches and celebrity bashes in the museum since.

He has appeared in many films, most recently watching impassively as a murderously glamorous museum staff member set out to reduce Paddington to a specimen, and the last film appearance of the late Robin Williams, in Secret of the Tomb, the last film in the Night at the Museum franchise when the cast of characters moved to London. He starred in the 1975 film One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing – although understandably the one the thieves actually make off with is the more petite Apatosaurus – blithely unaware that the plot also featured his ultimate nemesis, the blue whale.

He has been reconstructed twice after scientific consensus changed on how the enormous animals appeared in life, with his tail now curved over visitors’ heads, but his neck lowered to a horizontal position.

The museum is well aware of how much visitors love Dippy, and hopes more people than ever will soon see him if plans succeed for a national tour. A spokeswoman said that the cast was now very fragile, and would need careful conservation work first.