London's Natural History Museum has over 70 million animal specimens.

The weird and wonderful from every corner of the planet.

There are also some of the many spectacular animals that are no longer with us.

No museum in the world has a complete specimen of this species because human beings exterminated it in the middle of the 17th century.

And there are a lot of animals today that face the same fate as the dodo.

I've been asked to pick ten that I might take with me on my own personal ark.

What an impossible task that sounds.

What to choose to represent the marvellous ingenuity of nature?

I could choose those that grab the headlines: the majestic tiger.

The spectacular polar bear.