When my sister came across the Evolution Store in Soho, New York City, she knew I absolutely had to see it. This store has everything you need to make some high-quality additions to your home Cabinet of Curiosities. From insects, fossils, minerals, taxidermy animals, seashells and corals, skulls and skeletons, this store covers all bases for the Naturalist collector.
What struck me most about the displays, was the way they were presented as fine art. We usually only see these things presented in museums, where they are obviously art, but not always thought of as something we would like to have hanging on the bedroom wall. A skeleton is a beautiful thing, and a fossilized one embedded in stone is one of nature’s paintings perfectly framed. A trilobite or ammonite uncovered from the stone is a natural sculpture, and the minerals like stibnite and obsidian are natural patterns more intricate than any work of modern art, because it’s intricacy goes all the way down to the atomic level.
After some fretting over which dinosaur bone replica was within my price range and was cool enough looking, I went with an Allosaurus finger claw. The store has a very large collection of curiosities for sale on the website, and I could see that the collection was ever-changing as new items rotated in to replace those sold out.
I would highly-recommend putting this store on your “must see” list of attractions to check out on your next trip to the Big Apple, after, of course, the American Museum of Natural History.
Check out the complete flickr set here.