Museums invite unique exploration
I can’t think of a better way to spend a rainy day than kicking
around a dusty museum.
And I can’t think of a better museum to explore than one stuffed
with animals.
Museums invite unique exploration
I can’t think of a better way to spend a rainy day than kicking around a dusty museum.
And I can’t think of a better museum to explore than one stuffed with animals.
It was just such a day last week when we made a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a three-story collection of the rare, improbable and just downright fascinating.
I felt like a starving man at Baskin Robbins. After checking to make sure benitoite was well represented in the collection of minerals, I paused to look at a geode stuffed with amethyst crystals. The rock was big enough to tuck a toddler into. Then I stared at meteorites for a while before tackling the decision of what to do next.
The global warming stuff got a quick once over before I wandered up to a creaky mezzanine. The area housed a collection of Polynesian artifacts. The dimly lit space smelled of age. Lights went on as I approached display cases. The area held what one would expect it to: baskets, weapons, a canoe or two, masks, ceremonial objects and the like.
Other members of the family were poring over a vast collection of 19th Century blown glass. The glass was used to form accurate representations of scores of plants. Next door, glass was used to reproduce sea creatures.
The fragile creations were wrought in the best medium to preserve their color and fragile beauty in three dimensions, according to the explanation accompanying the displays.
But it was when we got to the animal collections that our pace slowed. Dinosaur skeletons and fossils filled a large area. A marine predator stretched nearly 40 feet, with a toothy mouth that could accommodate at least two adults. The fascination for dinosaurs that almost all of us share as kids returned. A fossilized pterodactyl stretched across one wall, its leathery wings large enough to loft a small plane. But nearby were fossils of tiny winged dinosaurs, some no bigger than a sparrow. The tiny creatures were a revelation to me.
More contemporary animals were stuffed and mounted. We all came to the same realization independently; it’s one thing to see animals in a zoo, but it’s an entirely different thing being able to closely approach and study animals that are no longer living.
Giraffes are quite a bit taller than we had realized.
An enormous collection of hummingbirds glittered in one display case, not far from another that contained beetles that dwarfed the birds.
We got a kick out of hunting for birds familiar to us in San Benito County and examined birds we would never see in the wild – mounted specimens of species gone extinct.
One display contained a great auk, a penguin-sized seabird that no longer exists. The exhibit card noted that it may be the only species whose extinction date can be pinpointed, since the last two of the flightless birds known to exist were clubbed to death by a Greenlander in the middle of the 19th Century.
Before any of us realized it, we’d been strolling the corridors of the museum for four hours.
While we prefer to enjoy wildlife that’s living and breathing, the opportunity to study animals the way scientists once did offered a host of its own insights.
As we talked the experience over, one of us recalled that, until early in the 20th Century, birders pursued their quarry not with binoculars but with shotguns.
