Grey's Journal:

Natural History

 June 11th, 2004
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I remember being in the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a child and looking at the stuffed animals in their glass cases.  I pressed my nose against the glass to get a better look at a grizzly bear when my father leaned toward me and casually remarked, ``They position the animals so you don't see the bullet hole.''

I tell that story when I travel to a museum with anyone, so I felt it necessary to begin this journal with it.

Although I had never actually gone into the London Natural History Museum I felt like I had from the numerous times I stood outside of it.

The building is beautiful, more imposing and awe-inspiring than most in London, especially Buckingham palace, a place that seems to actively try and look dull.  If I were to become a Prince of England -- preferably by marrying Zara Phillips, born the same year as I and only 11th in line for the throne -- I would forgo Buckingham as a place of residence and instead ask the Natural History Museum if I could have a room in one of its towers.




Natural History Museum, London
 Natural History Museum, London

Earth from the Air

Please note all the photographs on this page are copyright © The Natural History Museum, London.  They can be found at the Natural History Museum's Photographic Library.

The reason I had been in front of the Natural History Museum many times was because for several months there used to be in the garden a world-view-changing gallery of photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand called Earth from the Air, consisting of dramatic landscapes and human tragedy.

I saw this exhibit three times on my own before taking (separately) each of my parents and my then-girlfriend, Darby.  That made six trips to the doorstep of the museum without going inside, except once for one brief tour around the newly-opened Darwin Centre.

The Darwin Centre is a massive two-part undertaking.  Phase One (which opened about a year ago) holds 28 million preserved animal and plant specimens, 1% of which are available for public viewing.  Phase Two (scheduled for 2007) will extend the center's botany and entomology departments and provide the general public with a way to view 80% of the collection.  I liked the Darwin Centre precisely because there wasn't much to do or see besides the backstage tour of the facility.  This, I thought, served as a reminder that places like the Natural History Museum are not just galleries, but they are research institutions.  The Natural History Museum in London employs about 350 scientists and the American Museum of Natural History in New York employs 150.

While on the tour, I remember naively hoping while I was exploring the laboratories that the scientists at work would recognize me as one of their own and offer me a job.

Never mind that I hadn't studied biology in college and had only arrived in the country a week earlier, someone was going to stick their head out of a doorway, point to me and say: ``Hey, you there!  Important research needs doing and you're just the man!  Put on a lab coat and get going!''

I would demur out of modesty but the scientist (rightly sensing unrealized greatness within me) would insist.  I would go on to do amazing work while rising in the ranks of the museum before finally being appointed Science Advisor to the Prime Minister.  Working in the government, my policy of `More science!' would transform Britan into the most modern, successful, healthy and happy nation on Earth.

I indulged in this fantasy as I walked with the tour group past the seemingly endless rows of preserved life forms.  No one offered me a job, and perhaps it was for the best.  After about twenty minutes in the cool air that smelled of methylated spirits (formaldehyde) I began to feel ill.

At the end of the tour, we entered a room containing the large specimens -- jars large enough to contain swordfish and horses lined the walls.  The guide told us loud noises and vibrations needed to be avoided in this room because most of the jars were old and fragile.

Many of the specimens were collected in the late 19th and early 20th century and, at that time, scientists usually made their own glass jars.  Because these men were not professional glassblowers, the resulting specimen jars were not of sufficient quality to last a century.  The Darwin Centre is now in the process of moving them into more modern storage but, with millions of specimens, it will take some time.

I envisioned coughing too loudly and causing a glass tub of preserving to burst open and spill the 100-year-old mountain gorilla it contained over me.  This did not help my growing nausea.

Fortunately, just as I could hold down my breakfast no more, the guide diverted my attention to a collection of specimens that Darwin himself had collected and preserved while serving as naturalist on the Beagle.  This was sufficiently interesting to divert my attention from my ill feelings until the end of the tour.














But, all this was nearly a year ago now.  I realized the other morning that I had never been inside the rest of the museum, so, I returned at once to rectify this oversight.

The inside of the main hall is visually impressive.  It is large and airy, with a diplodocus skeleton to greet visitors and three sets of staircases leading off to the galleries.  I didn't notice it at first, but there is a tremendous amount of detail work in the terracotta bricks.  Monkeys crawl up the arches and all varieties of living creatures are carved into every available surface.

A little sign directed me to the two divisions of the museum: the Life Galleries and the Earth Galleries.  But, these might be more honestly labled: `Bugs, Dinosaurs, Things with Claws, Fangs, Poison Stingers and More!' and `Rocks, etc.'

Guessing (correctly) that the Earth Galleries might be the less interesting of the two, I went there first, knowing that if I chose to go there second, I would most likely never see it.  Rarely when one is tired and growing restless after a few hours in a musuem, does one care to finish the day off with a viewing of rocks.














I like going to museums, not so much because I'm there to learn anything new (like most people, I don't have the patience to read the long text descriptions) but because it's almost a church-like experience for a non-religious person like myself.

I remember a few years ago taking a special trip into New York City just to see an exhibit on genetics at the American Museum of Natural History.  The exhibit was one of the best I have ever seen.  It allayed peoples' misdirected fears about genetics, conveyed useful information, and did it all with an esthetic beauty in the exhibits.  I was nearly moved to tears by the accomplishments that the human genome project represented and the potential that it holds for life.  This feeling, I imagine, is similar to the spiritual elation, the sensation of being a part of something bigger than yourself, that religious people experience in a grand church.

But I've always been a science and technology fan-boy, so I'm a sucker for stuff like that.

I like the way the rooms are designed in science museums, especially in the more boring areas like the Earth Gallery where every bit of energy is expended to try and make things dramatic.  I like the dimly lit rooms with their ambient sounds of rocks grinding or lava flowing and cones of bright light focused on the exhibits.  There is something about these rooms that feels like steping into The Future.





But, it is an amusingly low budget future at times.  At the entrance to the Earth Galleries there is a large, modern-art-style earth that you ride an escalator through.  The designers must have had Epcot Center in mind when they designed it, but unlike Epcot, there is nothing inside this big earth.  It's just you and the escalator in a big metal sphere.

But somehow it's OK.  Precisely because it's obvious that the museum had limited resources to work with, you are more willing to suspend your disbelief.  Like watching the original Star Wars trilogy and not noticing the special effects and then watching the new trilogy and picking apart all the effects.  It's a different standard.

I walked around, idly examining the exhibits.  One was so hypnotically boring that I simply had to examine it.  On the wall were three circular windows with closed shutters that you could open to see what was displayed behind them.

``Open to see one of the oldest rocks on Earth'' proclaimed the first.  Indeed there was a rock behind the glass.  But this, for me, was the perfect illustration of the difficulty of making the geological sciences interesting.  Oldest rock in the world or not, for an untrained eye it was still just a brown rock.  I couldn't have distinguished it from petrified dinosaur droppings.

``Open to discover the oldest mineral in the world'' proclaimed the next.  Behind the shutter, oddly displayed in a disembodied mannequin hand, was a little pile of black sand.  Zircon Crystals the sign told me.  I tried to muster up a feeling of being impressed at the age (4,200 million years) but failed.

The last shutter said ``Open to find out how the Earth's core formed'' I opened the window and snorted a laugh as I was bathed in the red glow of a 70's lava lamp.  (Kindly donated by Mathmos Ltd as the sign noted, as though this lamp was a precious historical relic) There was an explanation of how the earth's interior activity related to this lamp, but I was too amused to read it.

Realizing that a lava lamp had become a source of endless mirth for me, I decided it was time to drift back to the Life Galleries.

Walking through one of the halls, a glass case filled with twigs caught my attention.  On closer inspection, I saw that the twigs held humming birds.






Out of curiosity, I decided to estimate the number of birds in the display.  Just as I began to do so, a troop of school children approached behind me with all the commotion that implies.

I would like to tell you how old these children were but, alas, I cannot.  In my family, I'm the only child.  I have no brothers or sisters, no nieces or nephews, and no cousins separated by an n-th degree, where n is an integer smaller than 10.  I never saw a baby grow into a teenager, so I have absolutely no sense of what children look like at what age, or what they can do when.  On the rare occasions I talk to little children, I don't have the slightest idea what to do.

This is the way I perceived the children and you will have to guess how old they were from it.  The were able to talk, walk, and were about as tall as my thigh.

One of the boys noticed me pointing at the birds and softly counting.  He took control of the situation, turning to his fellow classmates saying, ``Everyone shhhhhh!  The man is counting all the birds.''

His classmates looked at me, at the case packed with tiny birds, then back at me with their upturned faces and said in unison, `Oooooooooo' before silencing themselves so I could concentrate on what must have seemed to them a mental task of herculean proportions.  I had a little audience.

However, I felt like a bit of a charlatan.  The children had misunderstood my intentions and seen them as grander than they really were.  It was as if I was repairing a section of the Great Wall of China and they thought I had built the whole thing.

I tried to explain to the leader that I was estimating the number of birds not counting them.  The hummingbirds seemed to be evenly distributed in the case, so I had mentally divided the display into eight sections and was only counting the birds in one of those sections, 20, and multiplying that by 8 to get an approximate number: 160.

The little leader gave me a blank look and it dawned on me that children this small probably don't know what multiplication is.

``So you're not counting the birds?''

The spell was broken before I finished the `o' sound in `Well, no,' and they went back to chattering amongst themselves about whatever it is that occupies the minds of children.  I made my way past them and smiled a sort of embarrassed smile at their teacher who had an amused look on her face.

You can always find the interesting parts of a museum by listening to the ambient sound level.  By the noise metric, the Creepy Crawlies exhibit was one of the best things to see.  It attracted a great deal of children with its big animatronic scorpion, a house that showed where bugs hide, live ant colonies and a metal fly that ate dog poo before regurgitating it onto your sandwich.

And, of course, it goes without saying that the dinosaur hall was packed.  Here children who, under normal circumstances, seemed to be average in all regards became prodigies, knowing the scientific latin names, classifications, and geological periods of innumerable creatures and embarrassing their parents with this knowledge.

``Little Timmy, look at the T-Rex.  Isn't it scary?''

Little Timmy rolls his eyes and says, ``Dad, that's not a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it's a Tarbosaurus, but I'm willing to forgive your error because they are both members of the Tyrannosaurid family.  However, while physically imposing, there is nothing to fear as they are likely to have been scavengers, not predators.''

I walked past an animatronic display of two small and oddly-furry velociraptors waiting to pound on an unsuspecting nest of herbivores. A sign (doubtlessly there to divert the flood of questions) said that recent discoveries indicated that dinosaurs may have had fur.  I frowned at the tiger-striped velociraptors.  They looked like they were installed around the time I was born and wondered just how recent this discovery was.

My father once commented on the differences between my toys and the ones he had as a child.  On my toys, the dinosaurs held their tails aloft and used them as counter-balances, whereas when my dad was a kid, the dinosaurs dragged their tails uselessly on the ground -- like paralyzed limbs -- leaving one to question why they bothered to grow them. 

I wondered if my children would have furry dino toys.  If so, stuffed animal companies would be thrilled.  Then I cynically assumed that the stuffed toy companies had propabaly funded this fur study.

I walked into the final hall I would visit this day.  It was filled with artwork based on exhibits from the museum itself.  I stepped through the door into a narrow hallway of sorts.  I stood looking around for a moment before I had the feeling that someone was watching me.

I turned around and saw a little oriental woman positioned in a chair next to the door so that it was not possible to see her when you entered the gallery.  I was obviously startled and said, ``Oh, I'm sorry, you gave me a fright sitting there.''

She smiled a very big smile.

``I... I guess that must happen a lot,'' I continued, trying to fill the silence.

``Yes,'' she said, the smile growing larger. ``Yes, it does.''

I got the feeling she considered it her job to frighten people all day long and not to guard the gallery.  She took obvious pride in her work.

The symmetry of the universe was preserved when I exited the gallery on the other side.  Another woman was sitting in a chair but, from her position, her view was slightly obstructed, so patrons could see her but she couldn't always see them.

She didn't notice me until I was right next to her, both because of the visual obstruction and because she was busy sketching Count Olaf, the villain from the  Series of Unfortunate Events books on a pad of paper.  When she finally noticed me because my shadow fell over her light, she let out a little scream and jumped from her seat.

I felt badly for a moment, but on reflection, I could see why the oriental woman liked her job so much.  Perhaps I should again look into getting a job here.





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