A Guide to Science: Stuffin' Up

You probably thought that our last lesson pretty much summed up science. But it turns out that there is more to science than skeletons. This week, I went to the Grand Galerie d'Evolution, part of the broader Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. Much like the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, which was basically a couple of old guys' skeleton collections, this was a similarly lovingly displayed collection of animals. Only these ones were stuffed with taxidermy!

Theoretically, this museum is all about evolution. In reality, however, it is more about taking dead animals, stuffing them, and lining them up in interesting ways. And it is great.

Upon reading that this was a museum devoted to taxidermy, I imagined something along the lines of this:

That's not far off, actually.

The pièce de résistance, as my new Frenchy friends would say, is this procession of animals right in the middle of the Galerie.

Those are all real, dead animals! Apparently, the desired effect is that it should remind the viewer of Noah’s Ark, with all the animals lined up to board the big boat. It’s a fun, sarcastic gesture, what with this being the Grand Gallery of Evolution and all. As with the story in the Book of Genesis, I’ve got a few issues with this depiction of Noah and his Ark:

-       They’ve doubled up on giraffes. Actually, they have more than doubled up. They have like seven giraffes! Noah would never take seven giraffes on his barge.

-       They also have a lot of the deer/antelope/gazelle family. Luckily, they put them nice and close to the lions.

-       Not seeing a lot of primates in this exhibit. Or native New Zealand fauna, for that matter.

-       I’m starting to think that this exhibit was really just a convenient way to display the animals which had already been stuffed, and is not, in fact, an accurate depiction of an important historical event. 

Once I had moved past my anger at the above blasphemy, I went to look at a big tortoise.

This is Kiki, and he used to live in the Menagerie (zoo) next door. Now he’s all hollowed out and stuffed with rolled up newspapers, I imagine. Apparently, he was a presidential gift of some sort. In fact, the writing on the wall (in English!) said that gifting a giant tortoise was customary practice for a President. They probably didn’t have Cadbury Roses at that point, yet.

Kiki was really old when he died. It said he lived through both World Wars unharmed, so not a bad innings.

There was an exhibit about endangered and extinct animals. Unfortunately, they kept the room really dark, so I couldn’t take any great pictures. Maybe they wanted to pretend that the animals were just sleeping, so that we would stop thinking about how they are all filled up with those Styrofoam packing peanuts. 

God was really messing around when he made these fat, flightless things. They might be the one animal that actually seem more dignified in cartoons:

Obviously, they were my favourite things in the museum.

Or maybe second favourite, because there, in the endangered exhibit, we saw a kiwi. Two to be precise, and there was one more outside:

There it stood, peering down its long nose at the positively rotund polar bears and elephants, twitching nervously at the sight of the stoat, weasel and cat, and just seeming downright proud to be a New Zealander. It almost brought a tear to this reporter’s eye. Kia kaha, Mr Kiwi.

There was also an Australian section:

I didn’t ask any of the other punters, but I could tell they were all disgusted.

 
Upon stuffing, the animals had been arranged into natural poses. There was a sloth hanging from a branch, birds in full flight, children crying and ruining it for everyone else (unfortunately, not stuffed). There was even a tiger on an elephant:

I don’t remember ever seeing this in the Wild Thornberrys.

Towards the end, there was an illustration of how the taxidermy process occurs. It seems quite complicated, and apparently involves dissecting the animal, and then rebuilding it from the inside out. This is far more complicated than my method, which involves a water blaster and some Selley’s No More Gaps. But I’m only a semi-professional taxidermist.

All in all, this was an enjoyable meander, made more enjoyable because we exited past the happy hippo: