This time, however, I re-visited the museum for three specific reasons:
1) To see the new life-sized Megalodon model now hanging above the cafe.
2) To reacquaint myself with the Hope Diamond for an upcoming book on cursed objects (Fall 2020, Quirk Press)
3) To see the revamped fossil wing of the museum (dinosaurs, basically), which has been closed for the past five years.
In summary, the Meg was awesome, the Hope Diamond is unchanged in its extraordinariness (and still impossible to pose with because it spins around and is surrounded by glass and pressed around by three layers of crowd), and the new fossil wing was a disappointment for me. It lacked an atmosphere of awe and the exhibit infrastructure swallowed up the actual skeletons, and it felt like maybe a dinosaur exhibit at a much smaller museum and not one at a national museum. Mostly, though, I think it’s because I like my dino exhibits to be dimly lit and looking like they’re from the 19th century. Or I’m uncomfortable with change, one of the two.
Anyway, get to know the real me through this handful of photos I took at a museum with probably a million artifacts on display. I don’t think you’ll learn anything that you didn’t already know about me. Unless we’re just now meeting, in which case, “Hi, I love mummies.”
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| First thing I saw when I walked in. |
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| This gal has changed a lot since I last saw her. She has shrunk considerably (she only takes up half of her custom-made tank now) and she's a dry specimen now as opposed to immersed in preservative. Archie's faring far better. |
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| Sky Meg! |
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| The smaller of the museum's two giant squids. It's on the left. |
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| Artistic interpretation of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year old hominin whose remains were found in Ethiopia in the 1970s. |
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| A vampire bat. I will always take photos of vampire bats, especially when the exhibit illustrates so clearly why we should be terrified of them. |
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| The Hope Diamond, the most popular artifact in the entire museum. |
