I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:
Hall of Bones
Man and the Manlike Apes |
The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity of a tool all animals share, an internal skeleton. Without this scaffolding on which to drap our skin over and attach our muscules to, we’d be just a bunch of blobs, oozing from place to place… Well, that could be pretty cool too.
Visit the flickr set here.
Hall of Mammals
Morganucodon oehleri |
While the Hall of Bones fascinated me and was immensely instructional, the Hall of Mammals was fairly disappointing. Yes, the huge collection of diversity in the Class Mammalia is pretty amazing. Yes, the exhibit is very educational. It’s certainly not without merit.
However, I saw this exhibit the day following an all-day adventure at the Zoo, seeing real live animals, fully animated with their biological clockworks running with near indecipherable and irreproducible complexity.
Compare this to a collection of taxidermied animals, frozen in time, and positioned best as possible to appear as they do in real life, but still unconvincing enough to trigger my Uncanny Valley response.
That’s why we have to keep them alive.
Visit the flickr set here.