you begin at the level of the sea--walking through a dark cave of mollusks and passing by fish swimming in dark blue glass and massive sharks and very strange creatures, looking up at the baleen of a whale skeleton suspended in the air...Because the ceiling is not closed you can peer up to birds sitting above and mammals walking, or crouched over the first floor as though fishing. You ascend the stairs and see this whole world of land animals as though in real movement, like the whole world is contained within this one room. There are glass walls filled with jewel-like butterflies, beetles, and different crickets with big colorful wings. There are birds perched in various places up to the tall ceiling, cases of mushrooms and plants, and a case on taxidermy, which I always thought was some gross and horrible process where they preserve the insides of an animal with chemicals, but in fact is recreating the animal in motion as accurately as possible out of plaster and wood and other things, and then wrapping a real skin around that. The higher floors are about man's impact on the environment and what changes it has undergone. There are rooms of endangered or extinct animals. Visually even the explanations were clever and effective (an example: to show how many species have gone extinct in the last 300 years, they printed words and picture on a glass sheet that stood before a propped-up slice of a tree trunk that was 300 years old. First you look at the tree trunk, and then you read: "In the course of this tree's lifetime, this many species have gone extinct," and then you look at the little drawings and explanations.) The whole experience is awesome and frightening and beautiful...it makes so much sense at the same time. Why shouldn't the world have this much variety, this much detail, this much we are not familiar with? It is easy to forget the world is not just what we make, but has already been existing on a complex level we can hardly imagine for many many years.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Jardin des Plantes
After spending the morning inside...looking bleakly out my window at the cold sky which gave me no incentive to go out there...looking at the computer gave way to playing piano...I decided to go to the "Jardin des Plantes," a large garden/ménagerie, where there is a Museum of Natural History. That was where I went and it was AMAZING. That parade of animals (see picture) just opened my eyes to how much diversity the world is made of, and how fascinating things are, and how humans are just one piece of the picture. The museum was organized so well: 
you begin at the level of the sea--walking through a dark cave of mollusks and passing by fish swimming in dark blue glass and massive sharks and very strange creatures, looking up at the baleen of a whale skeleton suspended in the air...Because the ceiling is not closed you can peer up to birds sitting above and mammals walking, or crouched over the first floor as though fishing. You ascend the stairs and see this whole world of land animals as though in real movement, like the whole world is contained within this one room. There are glass walls filled with jewel-like butterflies, beetles, and different crickets with big colorful wings. There are birds perched in various places up to the tall ceiling, cases of mushrooms and plants, and a case on taxidermy, which I always thought was some gross and horrible process where they preserve the insides of an animal with chemicals, but in fact is recreating the animal in motion as accurately as possible out of plaster and wood and other things, and then wrapping a real skin around that. The higher floors are about man's impact on the environment and what changes it has undergone. There are rooms of endangered or extinct animals. Visually even the explanations were clever and effective (an example: to show how many species have gone extinct in the last 300 years, they printed words and picture on a glass sheet that stood before a propped-up slice of a tree trunk that was 300 years old. First you look at the tree trunk, and then you read: "In the course of this tree's lifetime, this many species have gone extinct," and then you look at the little drawings and explanations.) The whole experience is awesome and frightening and beautiful...it makes so much sense at the same time. Why shouldn't the world have this much variety, this much detail, this much we are not familiar with? It is easy to forget the world is not just what we make, but has already been existing on a complex level we can hardly imagine for many many years.
you begin at the level of the sea--walking through a dark cave of mollusks and passing by fish swimming in dark blue glass and massive sharks and very strange creatures, looking up at the baleen of a whale skeleton suspended in the air...Because the ceiling is not closed you can peer up to birds sitting above and mammals walking, or crouched over the first floor as though fishing. You ascend the stairs and see this whole world of land animals as though in real movement, like the whole world is contained within this one room. There are glass walls filled with jewel-like butterflies, beetles, and different crickets with big colorful wings. There are birds perched in various places up to the tall ceiling, cases of mushrooms and plants, and a case on taxidermy, which I always thought was some gross and horrible process where they preserve the insides of an animal with chemicals, but in fact is recreating the animal in motion as accurately as possible out of plaster and wood and other things, and then wrapping a real skin around that. The higher floors are about man's impact on the environment and what changes it has undergone. There are rooms of endangered or extinct animals. Visually even the explanations were clever and effective (an example: to show how many species have gone extinct in the last 300 years, they printed words and picture on a glass sheet that stood before a propped-up slice of a tree trunk that was 300 years old. First you look at the tree trunk, and then you read: "In the course of this tree's lifetime, this many species have gone extinct," and then you look at the little drawings and explanations.) The whole experience is awesome and frightening and beautiful...it makes so much sense at the same time. Why shouldn't the world have this much variety, this much detail, this much we are not familiar with? It is easy to forget the world is not just what we make, but has already been existing on a complex level we can hardly imagine for many many years.
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1 comment:
Tessa, as a bio major this post was so fun to read. Thanks for bringing a breath of foreign science into my BiHall-focused life! Hope you are well,
~Amanda
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