Hairy Museum of Natural History

Photograph of John Thomas Scopes.
Taken the month before the Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial. June 1925
Photographer: Watson Davis

The Smithsonian Institution Archives has uploaded 39 restored and previously unpublished photos from the “Scopes Monkey Trial” to Flickr. From their summary:

Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes “Monkey Trial” in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the images.

All photographs were taken by Watson Davis, Managing Editor of Science Service, while he was in Dayton, Tennessee, June 4-5, 1925, and July 10-22, 1925. LaFollette identified and dated each of these images, and has published a new book highlighting these and other images from the trial entitled, Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century, University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Tip of the Toupee to Boing Boing.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia.

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Passionate experts and the Museums that avoid them at Museum 2.0.

A representative excerpt:

Museums don’t have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it’s easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an “objective” authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don’t already have a connection.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia.

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Last week, Roxanne and I (along with a handful of other folks from the NMMNHS) popped up to Denver for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums. Lots of nifty stuff to see and hear, Denver’s great selection of museums to visit, and among the thousands of attendees were plenty of old contacts to catch up with and new museum folk to meet. I sat in on several great sessions dealing with museum exhibitry, interactive tech, and engaging web visitors, and as I spent some time going through my notes I’ll keep an eye out for interesting tidbits to post here. But for now I’ll put up some quick pics from the Museum Expo—dozens of vendors of all stripes packed into the Exhibit Hall of the Colorado Convention Center.

As might be expected, my picture-taking skewed heavily toward the paleo:

A cast Velociraptor skeleton and life restoration at the Pangaea Partners booth. Very nice coloring/patterning on the feathers:

This beauty was sculpted by Dennis J. Wilson of Pangaea Designs.

A rather different flavor of feathered theropod was on display at the Phil Fraley Productions booth:

This fantastically meticulous restoration of a dodo (on the left, of course) was commissioned by the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity in Singapore. Reprints of a pair of articles detailing the work that went into this piece were available at this booth, but are also available for download from this page.

The above models of a lobefinned fish and early tetrapod caught my eye at the Whitman Zahourek Foundation booth. The Foundation promotes anatomy education, and brought to my attention the Anatomy in Clay classes/manikins, which provide plastic skeletons of dogs, horses, and humans that allow for the attachment of plasticine “soft tissue” structures, as in the muscles attached to “Caniken,” below:

For me, this looks to be an excellent way to gain a more intuitive understanding of how muscle attaches to bone in paleo-restorations—certainly much less ‘visceral’ than dissection. Not that I’ve got anything against viscera, mind you, but I’ve always preferred additive processes to reductive ones. I’ll definitely be looking further into this.

Wish I could say that I’ll be posting more regularly, but I’m afraid things are going to continue to be slow here as I focus most of my time/energy into the upcoming Triassic exhibit at the Day Job—when I last mentioned it we were shooting for a March deadline, but the final opening date has since (thankfully) been set at May 17th. Now less than two weeks off…

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia.

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A little more news on the upcoming Triassic exhibit at the day job—Discovery News writer Larry O’Hanlon met with the NMMNHS Triassic Team last week, and has posted a teaser article up on his blog, Earth Impacts, with the promise of more to come.

The post includes a couple of illustrations done for the hall: a rendering of the early mammal Adelobasileus by illustrator Mary Sundstrom, and my own painting of a large archosauriform known from a few dozen well-weathered fossils from the Middle Triassic of New Mexico. The restoration (shown above) is based largely on big erythrosuchian predators like Erythrosuchus and Shansisuchus (from South Africa and China, respectively).

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, The Day Job, Triassic.

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The Albuquerque Tribune ran a story today on the project that’s been keeping me busy at the day job: a new Triassic Exhibit opening this March at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

This is the project I’ve been looking forward to working on since I started at the museum almost a decade ago, and finally all the pieces have come together to pull it off.  Everyone involved in the exhibit is itching to show off some the fantastic Triassic fossils from the museum collections. The article only hits some of the highlights: this photo shows a beautifully preserved young Coelophysis from the Museum’s Ghost Ranch block (read the article for more Coelophysis-as-cannibal news). Another picture shows a the beginnings of a life-sized model of a New Mexican erythrosuchian, while the final position of one of the big stars remains tastefully hidden until the opening.

I’m not certain how much I’ll be able to share here until the exhibit opens, but I’ll definitely pass along any info that’s been made public before then.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, The Day Job, Triassic.

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