More Like What We Were

Many thanks to my colleague, James Bryant, who posted a link on NHCOLL-L to this splendidly Pooterish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author is one Thomas H. Benton; "Thomas H. Benton," apparently, is the pen name of one William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College MI. (As an aside, I don't get why you would write an article under a pen name, then tell your readers your real name. Doesn't that defeat the point? Or is it like me saying, "hi, this is Chris, but today I'm writing in my Chuck persona?") Benton/Pannapacker's thesis is that some time in the past natural history museums lost their way - reading between the lines, this seems to have a lot to do with letting children in to run around the place with a lack of "decorum;" as with most things that are bad for you, this began in the 1960s. Damn those Baby Boomers!

I'm being a little unfair, because it's a better article than that. After starting unpromisingly with one of those thumbnail sketches of "man in a cluttered office full of interesting things" that serves as the lazy writer's shorthand for the eccentricities of museum life, Benton goes on to explain that such places as this office "are the accidental accumulations of time, rather than the clean, uniform, and often deadening spaces created by committees governed by the orthodoxies of a narrowly defined mission." Crikey, you can tell he works in the humanities, can't you? I feel obliged to note that they are also places where irreplaceable specimens get lost for generations, armies of cockroaches breed, and fires start in trashcans.

After this, we meander through some warm fuzzy reminiscences of Benton's youthful dalliances in various natural history museums, before finally getting to the meat of his argument. "At some point, apparently back in the 60s, natural-history museums began to focus on attracting children; it made sense for demographic reasons allied to the educational imperatives of the Cold War." Silly me - there was I, thinking that we wanted to use natural history to inspire and awaken their interest in science. Now I realize that we were just slaves to our educational imperatives. Anyway, it seems that grown-ups don't come and visit our museums any more. "Could you imagine a sharply dressed couple walking through a natural-history museum, making sophisticated remarks about the archaeology of knowledge and the frisson of old and new epistemologies?" ponders Benton. I am not ashamed to admit that I wept openly at his vision of what we have lost.

Anyway, the good thing about this article is that Benton does actually make some concrete suggestions about what natural museums should be doing about this. I'm not going to go through these point by point; you can go read them yourself. Some are reasonable; some describe things that museums are already doing; some are provocative; and some are just plain daft ("teach the conflicts"? - oh please, Thomas, you sound like a warm-up act for Kirk Cameron). So I'll just pick a couple of his ideas that I think are worth looking at in more detail.

First, Benton thinks museums should "stop being ashamed of dead animals." What it it with these social historian types? They're obsessed with taxidermy - my wife and I used to joke that the only time that natural history museums turned up in Museums Journal was when someone (and it was never a natural history curator) tried to turn taxidermied specimens into the front line of the culture wars. This happened every couple of years, regular as clockwork. I'd hate to break it to these guys, but the main reason museums take taxidermy off display is that it's really, really bad taxidermy - for every masterpiece like a Carl Akeley or Perry Wilson diorama, there are a hundred sausage-shaped monstrosities with bulging glass eyes and straw sprouting from their seams.

Second, Benton is not a fan of anthropology in natural history collections. "Apart from prehistoric human evolution—a branch of the history of primates—avoid anthropology, which has often led to ill-considered displays of indigenous cultures that are offensive and rightly scare away potential supporters." He's not the first to make this point and there is a case to be made that it is intrinsically offensive to display non-western cultural objects alongside animals in a natural history museum, rather than in a museum of art or ethnography.

The counter argument, of course, is that museum displays exist to share the museum's collections with the widest possible audience (or at least, they should do) and that, like it or not, many natural history museums have extensive and important collections of human artifacts. You could also argue that humans are part of the natural world and that our culture is an integral part of the biology of our species.

Then there is the historical angle. Elsewhere in his article, Benton argues forcefully that museums should not "sacrifice" their history and, like it or not, museums have an unenviable history as promoters of scientific racism in the 19th and 20th Centuries. If you want to read more about this, I'd suggest taking a look at "The Race Gallery" (1995), Marek Kohn's masterly overview of racial science. Forget futile attempts to engage with the creationists - here indeed is a "conflict" worth teaching.

Samson - An Update

Back in September, I posted on the forthcoming auction of a substantially complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus, called Samson, that was about to go under than hammer at a Bonham's auction in Las Vegas. For those of you who still don't know, it failed to reach its reserve price of $6 million; the highest bid was $3.7 m. The owner initially declined to part with Samson for less than the reserve, but on November 12 of this month Bonhams announced that a sale had been made. As ever, the buyer remains anonymous. Various news outlets trumpted this story as "Sampson is Heading for Museum," or headlines to that effect. This is not entirely true.

What's actually happened is that the new owner is trying to find a museum that is prepared to take Sampson on loan for the purposes of display. Now you might think that any self-respecting museum would jump at this opportunity but, as ever, it's not as simple as that. Sampson will take up a sizeable chunk of display space; will probably require the museum to shell out significantly to develop lighting and display content; and will require hefty insurance cover. And all of this assumes that the new owner will not be charging for the loan. It's far from clear that this will be the case - Bonham's auction catalog was quick to highlight the moneymaking opportunities presented by owning your own T. rex.

All of which means that if it were my museum that was interested in taking Sampson, I'd have lawyers crawling all over the loan agreement. I'd want a long loan period - maybe as much as 10 years - with first refusal on a renewal. I'd push hard for a cast specimen (at a discounted price), to permanently replace Sampson at the end of the loan. I'd want far-reaching waivers of liability for any damage incurred while on display and I'd probably insist on the donor handling care and maintenance, even if I had in-house expertise. I'd also be considering doing a deal to license any exhibit content I develop, for use with casts of Sampson that the owner is selling or loaning to other museums. And I'd want to be able to make the specimen available to visiting researchers as well as the general public; this would be subject to formal approval by the owner, but I'd want a "which will not normally be refused" clause. Actually, I probably want a lot more than this, which is why I raised a skeptical eyebrow when Bonham's spokesman said the new owner was planning on having it on display by Christmas. It may well be on display, but I doubt whether this will be in a museum.

So, is this a bad thing? I guess the answer is "not entirely." Sampson will be on exhibit, which is good. A canny museum, with good negotiators that can develop a partnership with the owner, could actually come out of this with a pretty sweet deal. And while this might be a novel situation for natural history museums, our colleagues in the art world would barely raise an eyebrow at the idea of borrowing a privately owned work for exhibit. Sampson is a bit more complicated than this, because there's more involved than just hanging a painting on a wall, but the general principles are the same. In an age when private ownership of fossils has become rather fashionable, we may have to swallow hard and get used to arrangements like this.

The downside, of course, is the issue of permanence. Another fact that emerged in the post-sale interviews is that the new owner is the third one that Sampson has had since it was discovered. If the skeleton remains in private ownership, it can be sold again and again; in these days of financial upheaval, that's a very real possibility. Which means that for all the good intentions of the current owner there's no certainty of access in the long-term, either for the public or for anyone wanting to carry out research on this specimen. As I've said many times before in this blog, this is why you put things in museums - so that future generations have a guarantee of access. This is why our community gets upset when universities like Brandeis start talking about selling off their collections and why I get twitchy when museum policy wonks get all gung-ho about deaccessioning.

So if you happen to be the mysterious new owner of Sampson, congratulations on your purchase and much kudos to you for moving quickly to get it onto public display. I urge you to put it in a museum (rather than a casino lobby, for example) and to partner with that museum to produce some really high-quality educational and exhibit material to make the best possible use of an extraordinary specimen. But beyond that, you should think seriously about donating the specimen. Yes, it's cool owning a T rex, and it did cost you a ton of money. But anonymous or not, donating it would put you into the big league of museum philanthropy, and earn you the gratitude of an army of future museum goers.

Deaccessioning. Again

Flipping through the pages of Time recently (hey, I don't have time to analyse the news myself. I need someone to do it for me. Preferably with nice graphics and a couple of bar charts) I came across this article, which is yet another "hey, why don't we make deaccessioning sexy by asking the public what they think we should throw away. This time it's UCL. Guys! This is like so five minutes ago. Manchester did it far better with the hermit. At least UCL didn't clutter up their rationale with a bunch of guff about how this is making their institution sustainable - they cheerfully admitted that their major aim was to make space for new stuff. I'm all in favor of collecting; collect-or-die is an excellent motto for museums. Except natural history collections where it's more a case of collect-and-die, especially if you happen to be the unfortunate organism being collected.

The Time article implies that the UCL exercise and ones like it are shining a light on the processes by which museums dispose of material and that this is something that many museums would like to keep hidden because it is contentious; they cite the recent Brandeis case as an example of the passions that might arise. Personally I think this link is a bit tenuous. In 20 odd years of working with collections, I have never disposed of anything where I wasn't 100% sure it was a piece of worthless junk; if I was less sure than this, I kept it. There's nothing at all contentious about that. What aroused fury about Brandeis was not disposal per se (although there were plenty of people unhappy about that as well) but the fact that the university was proposing to sell off the collections and use the proceeds to fund other, non-museum activities. This is generally considered to be a breach of the institution's duty of reasonable stewardship. Now, an article where museums talk candidly about responsibility - that would be worth reading.

2012

If you've been living under a rock (or perhaps in Utah) for the past few months, you may have missed the fact that a movie called "2012" is opening next week. For the rest of you, I'm sure by now you are heartily fed-up of the barrage of Mayan-inspired pseudoscience whirling around this movie, which posits that the world will suffer a series of planet-shaking catastrophies in a couple of years' time. No? Well, here's some more.

2012 is the brainchild of German director Roland Emmerich. Emmerich is a cinematic bête noire of mine, rivalling that other dollar-guzzling monster Richard Curtis. While Curtis's speciality is cheerily heartwarming tales of middle-class British niceness masquerading as comedy, Emmerich specializes in heartwarming tales of ordinary folk surrounded by the deaths of millions. He has become known as a specialist in end-of-the-world disaster movies, whether through alien invasion ("Independence Day"), climate change ("The Day After Tomorrow"), or giant radioactive lizard ("Godzilla")

My grudge against Emmerich goes back to his Revolutionary War epic "The Patriot" (2000). I could forgive him casting an Australian (Mel Gibson) as the only non slave-owning Southern landowner in the 18th Century, or for having another character who was a heroic Frenchman (obviously a foretaste of Emmerich's later science fiction and fantasy films). No, what I objected to was having him turn my fellow countrymen into a bunch of barn-buring Nazis. Sorry, Roland, but it was your army that did things like that, not mine.

However, like Curtis, Emmerich seems to be a nice man, who has been an active campaigner for gay rights; against racism in Hollywood; and promoting awareness of global warming. And it's not really his fault if there are a bunch of wingnuts out there that think his film is true. He has managed to skillfully weave a bunch of genuine geophysical nasties like the Yellowstone Supervolcano, Mega-tsunamis, and "The Big One" into a tale of planet-crushing horror - all that's missing from the mix is a dose of Asteroid Porn. Setting aside the morality of treating the deaths of millions as suitable subject for entertainment (hey, if you don't want to watch, you don't have to go) and Emmerich's formulaic "ordinary-joe-thrown-into-desperate-struggle-for survival" screenplay, it's probably not a bad date movie.

However, it has given a raft of academics from a variety of fields the opportunity to get onto TV (and into the papers, and on-line) and, in doing so, get some real research into the spotlight. How long has Mayan cosmology been waiting for it's day in the sun? But if there's an astronomical phenomenon that needs explaining, my go-to guy is the awesome Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Nova presenter and Director of the Hayden Planetarium at AMNH. Sure enough, last week Tyson sent all staff at AMNH an email circular that pulled no punches:

Now occupying nearly 50-million web pages on the Internet, the 2012 fears derive from nothing more than a hoax of the scientifically illiterate perpetrated on the scientifically uninformed.

Wow - I'm totally going to steal that line and use it at dinner parties. If you change the "2012" to, say, "H1N1 vaccine," "Darwinius maxillae," or "the millennium bug" you'll see that it has broad applicability for a variety of scientific debates. Of course, Tyson then went on to undermine the considerable force of his argument (IMO at least) by giving readers three video links to calm their fears; CNN, Jimmy Fallon, and a video Q&A. All featuring.... Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Some people may fear the impact of a planet-sized body on Manhattan, but as far as I can see a planet-sized ego impacted there some years ago with minimal damage and is still around today.

[disclaimer: after I pointed out Tyson's self-promotional chutzpah to a colleague of mine, I was accused of being a "hater." So, for the record, I think Neil is one of the best popularizers and advocates for science around today. And I am not a "hater." Except where Richard Curtis is concerned]

Stuck in Perissodactyl Hell

I've not been very productive on the blog front this month, partly because I'm mired in a project to develop a website on perissodactyl evolution. This is something that I should have kissed goodbye to when I left AMNH, but like Brer Rabbit's tar baby, it seems to have come along for the ride to Yale. Between editing the reams of text generated by our consultant; trying to find decent, copyright free images of obscure Eocene perissodactyls (Palaeotherium, anyone?); and manually inserting creative commons links for said images, I've been run ragged.

Then there's the etymological glossary of names of perissodactyls and other fossil mammals mentioned in the site. Why did we ever decide to do this? One of the problems with early authors of names (e.g. Cope and Marsh) is they assumed that their readers would have had the benefit of a classical education and that providing an etymology was a redundant exercise.

Thank God for Theodore Sherman Palmer, who in 1904 published the Index Generum Mammalium, 984 pages giving the authors, citations, and etymology of every genus of living and fossil mammal known at that time. And thank Google for scanning the whole thing and putting it on line - you can view it and download a PDF copy here. Of course, those pesky Greek roots are all in the Greek alphabet (even Palmer wasn't above making assumptions about his reader's education), but armed with MS Word's Greek typeface and the awesome Greeklish Converter even this problem is not insurmountable. God, I love the web.

Anyhoo, I'm on track to deliver the site content to my colleagues at AMNH next week. This is about the time that the content for the Paleoportal Fossil Preparation website should arrive from my other consultant. Which also needs editing for a deadline. Then in the monthly collection managers meeting, I get told that I'm being volunteered to review collections content for the Peabody website.

God, I hate the web. I'm going to unplug my computer and go back to writing letters. With a quill pen.

One word - plastics

A friend of mine, Terri, sent me a link to this website. It's one of those sites where you don't know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, it looks like some bizarre art school project. And on the other hand it's a tragic indictment of just how polluted our oceans are becoming. These photos are the remains of Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis), which nest on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific. Ocean currents in the Pacific cause floating plastic garbage to accumulate in two huge patches, which happen to be right within the feeding grounds of the albatross - you can read a paper on this that was published by Young et al in PLoS ONE by clicking here). The adult albatrosses are attracted to the brightly colored plastic, swallow it (hey, they're birds - noone claiming they can make good choices), then fly back to Midway to feed it to their chicks. The website, which was produced by photographer Chris Jordan, shows what happens to the chicks - they fill up with inedible plastic doohickeys and eventually die. On the plus side, the Laysan albatross is the second most common seabird in the Hawaiian Islands, with a population of 2.5 million birds and a range that is expanding to include new nesting islands. Having said that, they're going to need to breed at a furious rate to offset this mortality.

A New One for the Policy Manual

Over on Museum-L this week there was a curious request - did anyone have a Paranormal Investigation Policy? You may chuckle, but some museums that own or run historic properties apparently get inundated with requests from "researchers" who want to study paranormal phenomena. Just in case you haven't seen Ghost Hunters, these are people who festoon your historic house with microphones, cameras, thermometers, etc in search of spooks. The two "stars" of Ghost Hunters apparently learnt their trade by working as plumbers for Roto-Rooter. I kid you not. Anyway, I was tempted to write back to the list and say "yes, we have a policy - it's called a collections security policy and it says that letting totally unqualified whack-jobs wander around our museum in the middle of the night looking for ghosts is not in keeping with our duty of collections care." Jeeze, people! I guess this is why we write policies in the first place - to compensate for an absence of common sense.

If there is a serious side to this (and there probably isn't) then it's the fact that the proliferation of these idiotic paranormal shows is yet more evidence for the atrocious lack of respect afforded to science, scientific research, intellect, and scholarship in the USA. On the one hand, people are prepared to put their kids (and other people's kids) at risk of serious illness because they won'tbelieve a stack of hard scientific evidence on vaccine safety. But on the other hand, they'll sit down and watch a couple of ex-plumbers trying to prove the existence of ghosts, on the basis that "science can't explain everything." Those of us who do science for a living - and I guess I'd reluctantly have to include myself in that category - have spent years training, sitting exams, writing dissertations, applying for grants, running experiments, recording observations, testing hypotheses, and arguing the merits of our conclusions through a brutal peer review process. We didn't just wake up one morning and think "Hey, maybe I'll be a scientist today!" It would behove the great American Public to acknowledge the worth of that occasionally.

[PS - Happy Halloween!]