Exhibition: The Deep, Natural History Museum

If we were in any doubt, BP has shown the tissue-thin limit of human capacity; how clumsy and hopeless we are just a few metres away from home.

Clunking robots, blundering oafs with spanners and hamfisted submersibles are the best we can manage.

Meanwhile, in the inky depths (and getting inkier) a legion of Darwin's wonders are going about their business with blissful efficiency.

This new exhibition illuminates why the climate at 10,000m is so harsh and unfriendly to us and how these trials have tested a range of biological templates, forcing upon them correction, adaptation or oblivion.

In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan concluded the sea was bottomless because it proved longer than his piece of string.

Since then, we have been measuring, recalibrating and reappraising the furthest point of this unknown eco-system - less charted than the surface of the moon.

The record is 10, 914m by the Trieste in 1960 but in 1934 William Beebe and Otis Barton became ridiculous contortionsts in their weeny steel marble to record a record depth of 923m.

On a heady mix of life-saving gases they saw biological wonders that were a product less of examination and more of hallucination.

But, drugs and dreamscapes are the perfect catalysts to imagine the creatures displayed here. Even their names seem to come directly from the pages of Harry Potter, or JRR Tolkien - roundnose grenadier, bristlemouth, fangtooth.

Creatures both robust - because of the crushing pressures - and delicate. Adaptations from the realms of the mythical - like bioluminescence (the stoplight loosejaw) or extremism. (The alfonsino has such large doe eyes that turns a seemingly rank and file fish into a Disney heartbreaker).

Oliver Crimmen, Natural History Museum's fish curator, said. "The pressure at the deepest point in the ocean is 10,000 times greater than what life experiences on land. So deep sea fish have bodies designed to withstand these huge pressures.

"Some have paper thin skeletons with soft watery tissue that can't be squashed. Others can fill and empty their air bladders as they move up and down. But if they are bought up too quickly their insides expand and explode out of their soft bodies."

Food is scarce. They feed on each other, dots of bacteria and dead things that float down from the surface - a sperm whale skeleton, on display, provides sustenance for 50 years.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of light, food, warmth and congenial environment, the deep sea is the crucible of life, favouring durability and flexibility that would be eventually hardwired into the DNA of all living things.

By the deep sea vents, super heated water emerges at 300C, unable to boil or steam because of the pressures. Despite the hostility, tube worms, clams and blind white shrimp thrive.

And it was from this brew of heat and chemicals that biologists believe life turned from a string of reactions into a weird molecule capable of self-replication and adaptation.

This exhibition aims to capture that epic drama with a range of specimens in jars and artefacts from historic dives.

Children will love the interactive elements, including a submarine, and the more grotesque creatures, but this is a wordy exhibition and requires some focus to illuminate the gloom.

– From July 2010