We’ve all seen Night At The Museum, and we all know what we’d do first when left to our devices when dusk falls alongside the dinosaur bones at night.
For Red Bull, their answer is loud and clear: they’d set up some ramps and turn the iconic Natural History Museum into a skatepark. Which, by the way, is exactly what they did.
The energy drink brand that gives you wings (which would certainly be handy while tackling the air on your board) were given the keys to the Natural History Museum for a week between the hours of 10pm and 5am; when not a regular visitor could be found, leaving just the skaters and the fossils.
Now, you can catch footage of what it looks like when a group of skaters get free reign to glide around the collection of ancient artifacts, with a film shot posted on the Red Bull YouTube channel today.
Ramps and railings were set up around the space for the trio of skaters, including six-time X-Games gold medalist Leticia Bufoni, to roam and kickflip their way through history.
Skatepark designer Joe Ciaglia was on hand to transform the exhibition rooms housing the collections into a prehistoric skatepark. Skating royalty Margie Didal took the skaters and their boards around the park that no one will be able to ride at again, allowing them to even perform a kickflip over the velociraptor skeleton – with the help of a mega ramp down the stairs to Hintze Hall.
Other tricks for the skaters to add to their CVs were freestyling on a tank with a crocodile, sessioning on the entrance rails and hitting up the benches in Minerals Hall. Safe to say they nailed their landings to the extent that even a vintage pterodactyl would be proud.
Red Bull skate athlete Leticia Bufoni said: “It was a historic moment for the skate scene. We are used to being kicked out of museums or their grounds, but on this occasion the Natural History Museum allowed us to come inside and create a park around their stuff. They had obviously never had ramps in there so it was cool to create them all and skate this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“I was pretty nervous skating around their artifacts. We were taking big risks to avoid damaging them. It was certainly one of the craziest nights of my life.”