Graffiti Bigotry

Racist graffiti in the streets of Galatasaray reflects the social tensions underlying Turkish society all too clearly.

I took the photo above at the end of last summer. Two days later, someone had sprayed over the offending slogan.

At the Paris Museum of Natural History

This statue of a mammoth stands in front of the awesome Paris Museum of Natural History, where I had a mind-blowing experience last spring.

Compared to the annoying profusion of over-simplified digital toys and boring "interactive" displays in most "modern" natural history museums, the Parisian Museum is extremely refreshing in its straightforward attitude. No shitty videos. No models and "educative" gimmicks. Only fossils, specimens, more fossils, more specimens, and nothing else.

Here, by the way, is the utterly cool marble statue of a mother orangutan strangling a man. In my violent dreams, this would be the ultimate punishment for all the witless, snobbish exhibition designers who think that digital, pedagogical crap is more interesting than the fossils.

The awesomeness of the museum becomes apparent when you first enter the Hall of Comparative Anatomy, and confront this model of the human body surrounded by thousands of animal skeletons.

All of these pictures are large sized, so make sure you click on them to see more details. Here are a bunch of rhinos, lions, bears and other large mammals.

Both species of large rhinoceroses are represented.

Another shot of the awesome rhino skeleton. The horn on its nose is a actually made of matted hair, and does not fossilize.

This is an African buffalo, Syncerus caffer.

The gigantic skeleton of an elephant looms above all other mammals. I think this was an African elephant, Loxodonta africana.

This, on the other hand, is a dromedary camel, Camelus dromedarius. Check out the weird, two-toed feet.

Rows of skeletons from dozens of species of monkeys. What a visual spectacle!

Here is the skeleton of a Mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, with a species of baboon in the foreground. Just look at their awesome, killer jaws!

Shelf upon shelf of skulls from capuchin monkeys. Each one is from a different species.

The hallway also contains mounted skeletons of huge whales. The one in the very front is a sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus.

This gigantic, boat-like artifact is actually the skull and jaws of another huge baleen whale.

Not all mammals in the halls were giants. Here is the skeleton of an echidna, possibly of the genus Tachyglossus. I really regret not being able to record all the labels on the skeletons.

Birds were likewise not absent from the immense collection. Here is a flamingo, Phoenicopterus sp. and various other waterbirds.

A massive collection of crocodile and alligator skeletons.

A Chelydrid snapping turtle.

This bizarre, lizard-like skeleton was one of the strangest artifacts in the entire museum. At first glance, it could pass unnoticed among the dozens of similar reptilian skeletons around it. A closer glance, however, reveals unusual features. The thing is bipedal, with three-toed feet unlike anything else in the reptile world. Its ribs and skull are also strange.

The label of the "animal", Multispecies incroyabilis, however, clearly announces it as a fabricated chimera. The animal is a joke, albeit one that only zoology-literate people can get.

Entire shelves were also dedicated to fish. With their unfused skulls composed of sheets and plates of curving bone, they had a most unreal beauty.

These are such great photo opportunities that I wondered why anyone hadn't done a book based on the skeletons from the Paris Museum of Natural History. Turns out, such a book actually had been produced.

These scary-looking teeth of a ray are actually used to harmlessly crush and eat mollusks and crustaceans.

As if skeletons weren't enough, the museum also had jars upon jars of dissected animals, fully open to public view. Here is the internal anatomy of a giant European legless lizard, Ophisaurus apodus.

A dissected monitor lizard, Varanus griseus. This species also happens to be the largest lizard known from Turkey.

Even great apes such as this (wax cast of a) poor orang-utang have not esceped the scalpel of the Enlightenment anatomist.

Shelves upon shelves upon brains offer a fantastic comparison of various animals' brain sizes. Kudos to the French for allowing the entire public to see these fascinating, if gruesome anatomical details.

I wonder how long such an exhibit would last in the States or the UK before some chickenshit "museum studies" pussy would yank it off the shelves for being "cruel to animals," or "emotionally unsettling."

But the most mind-blowing part of the entire museum was one tiny cabinet dedicated exclusively to "monsters," or freaks of nature. Here is a chick with two faces and three eyes.

What about this? A cyclops kitten with only one eye!

The parade of weirdness goes on, with freak-of-nature after freak-of-nature hammering your brain with strangeness, and your brain screaming out for more. Here is a pigeon with four legs.

A piglet with two lower bodies beneath its waistline.

You want more? Here is a bunny with two bodies, one eye, four ears and NO FACE!!!

This wax cast of a pair of siamese-twin calves was especially artful.

Here is another pair of calves, this time joined from the face and the chest.

Here is another view of the great Hall of Comparative Anatomy.

But that is not all! There is another hall, just as big as the one above, that is dedicated to fossil animals. I had something close to a nerd orgasm after seeing all the fossils laid out before me.

Here is an outdated mount of an Allosaurus, with the long neck of a Diplodocus in front.

The model and fossils of Bothriolepis, an ancient placoderm fish from a lineage that left no living descendants. This fish had unusual fins encased in jointed, limb-like armor plates.

Another placoderm on display was this Dunkleosteus; a monster at more than five metres long. Here are the assemblage of plates that made up its jaws and front body.

Another prehistoric monster, but this time a from a later era. Meet Sarcosuchus imperator, possibly the largest crocodylian known to date. It was really cool that the actual fossil was on display, with no bars or layers of plexiglass around it.

While it looks like another Sarcosuchus, this is actually the skull of Teleosaurus, a Jurassic-era marine crocodile.

The cast of everyone's favorite raptor, Deinonychus antirrhopus.

The face-on shot of the skull of Arsinoitherium zitteli, a hulking, rhino-like mammal possibly related to elephants and hyraxes. An exact such shot of the exact skull was used by a sensationalist newspaper in Turkey in an article about Satanists and their evil, Satan-worshiping ways.

Speaking of the devil, here is a skeleton of the most shit-in-your-pants mammalian predator in the entire museum. Meet Smilodon, the saber-tooth tiger.

More and more weirdness. This is the skeleton of Thalassocnus, a giant sloth. As if that wasn't enough, Thalassocnus was also a giant swimming sloth. There was literally thousands of specimens like these in the museum, each with its own spectacular life history and anatomical details.

I spent four hours in the museum before leaving. I'd gladly have spent four more if the museum had not, you know, closed down.

Compare the amazing parade of life and nature in the Parisian museum with the lifeless, vomit-bag aesthetics and skull-fucking tepidity of the "interactive" video displays that make up the London Natural History Museum's dinosaur "exhibit."

To add insult to the injury, the information presented here is all wrong! Here, Archaeopteryx is listed as "not a dinosaur..."

While Deinonychus, erroneously restored as a bumbling big lizard, is listed as a dinosaur! This is a ghastly error; the two animals were very closely related - their skeletons look virtually identical! In any case, it is really silly to take up precious museum space crappy monitors teaching nothing but word games, and not the fossils themselves.

I don't know who designed the awful dinosaur exhibit, but perhaps he or she spends some of his or her time on the internet. If you ever stumble upon this blog, dear museum-space-designer, know this: You are a moron. You are a moron who brings disgrace to your profession, the NHM, and even your country. And you could possibly use a trip to Paris.

A Sign of the Times

Red paint splatters the walls on the Greek Consulate in Istanbul after local anarchists, in support of their Greek counterparts, staged a rather active protest.

The Greek response against police brutality, as well as Turkish solidarity with the protesting Greeks, is indeed admirable. However, one wonders why the Turkish activists are so silent against widespread police brutality on their own turf.