Animal Body Worlds exhibit opens

An exhibition at London's Natural History Museum is giving visitors the opportunity to see underneath animals' skin.

The exhibition, created by the team behind Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds shows, has used the same "plastination" process to preserve and solidify animal specimens.

Plastination essentially swaps the water in body tissues with a polymer, usually silicon, which preserves and solidifies them - turning bones, muscles and blood vessels to plastic.

The show features a shark composed entirely from a solidified network of its own blood vessels and a dissected adult elephant, with its skeleton expanded, enabling visitors to see its huge internal organs.

Here exhibit designer Angelina Whalley and Richard Sabin, the Natural History Museum's curator of mammals, describe some of the specimens on display.

Animal Inside Out opens at the Natural History Museum, London, on Friday 6 April