Natural History Museum - Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature: Amazing Animals and the Magical Creatures of Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts

Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE is described by the Guinness World Records as the worlds greatest living explorer. He has summited Everest, discovered the Lost City of Ubar and is the only man alive to have travelled around the Earths circumpolar surface. While continuing to raise millions for charity through his expeditions and global presentations, Sir Ranulph is an active conservationist.

A s an expedition leader, Ive been fortunate enough to observe some of the worlds most spectacular wonders. I have summited Everest and gazed down at the lower peaks of the Himalayas piercing the blanket of cloud below. I have retraced David Livingstones famous journey in a dugout canoe up the Zambezi River to Victoria Falls. I have traversed the globe from pole to pole, mapping 1,500 kilometres of uncharted territory. When you are out in these far-flung reaches of the planet, you never know when you might encounter a fantastic beast

During my transglobal expedition in the 1980s, myself and my friend Charlie found ourselves stranded on an ice floe. We sheltered in our freezing tent with only the odd square of flapjack and two minutes of radio access to BBC World Service news to lift our spirits each day. Luckily there was no time to get bored as we had a procession of visitors to our remote hideaway. Nineteen to be exact. Nineteen enormous, curious polar bears.

We were alerted to each arrival by snuffling and scratching around the tent, coupled with the faint smell of fish. Charlie would grab a camera, and I would snatch up a couple of pots and pans to bash together loudly. When polar bears hear a noise they do not recognise, most will move away although it does depend, of course, on how hungry they are at the time. Before my trip, the Canadian authorities assured me that only ten per cent of Canadian polar bears would eat a human. Unfortunately when youre confronted with one, theres no time to ask whether it is part of the majority or not.

My love for exploration really began when, as a young officer in the British army, I joined the army of the Sultan of Oman. It was there that I overcame the arachnophobia Id lived with since being bitten by a spider as a boy in South Africa. A wolf spider jumped on my leg whilst I was camped with my mobile unit in the southern reaches of the Empty Quarter a huge desert in the Arabian Peninsula. I was too proud in front of my soldiers to do anything but grin and brush it off. There were lots of snakes, too some deadly. I was trained to recognise vipers, lizards and scorpions, spending many hours holed up in caves in the mountains on the Yemeni border spotting different species. Indeed, I got so good at this that while on leave in London I ended up speaking with the team at the Natural History Museum. Back then, no naturalists other than the famous botanists Theodore and Mabel Bent, in the late nineteenth century, had ever been officially allowed in Dhofar to observe scorpions and so I was happy to help out. If you visit the Museum, theres a wonderful black specimen that I am proud to have discovered. It even has my name on it in Latin I sometimes visit and give it a stroke.

The world is finite and there is only so much territory for an adventurer to cover, yet botanists, zoologists, glaciologists and geologists and, of course, Magizoologists can continue to explore areas many times over. If you take a naturalist into the middle of a jungle, there may be others who have been there before, but none would have gone equipped with the knowledge base or technology around today. Every new visitor holds the potential to discover a species or record a natural phenomenon previously unknown to science. Now that is true exploration.