I started this blog in December 2010, and if any occasion called for a bit of reflection on why I started writing here and how it turned out, it would be this. Unfortunately, this year has been so overwhelming on so many fronts that I don’t have a long yarn in me, so I’ll be brief.
If you go back to my earliest posts—and I strongly discourage you from doing so—you’ll see that I didn’t start with much of a plan. I was inspired by the science communication work of folks like Riley Black, Lisa Buckley, Darren Naish, and Mike Taylor, and wanted to give it a try. However, it wasn’t long before I started poking at one subject in particular: the history of paleontology exhibits in museums.
I had been reading reflexive discussions about how art and ethnographic objects were displayed in museums, and saw parallels with the sorts of exhibits I was more familiar with—dinosaurs, mostly. But with the notable exceptions of Paul Brinkman and Rachel Poliquin, few authors were exploring the subject (happily there are several new books on the cultural history of natural history exhibits, including works by Ilja Nieuwland, Lukas Rieppel, and Karen Rader and Victoria Cain). Meanwhile, I found photos like the one below intriguing on a personal level. I recognized the National Museum of Natural History’s collection of dinosaur skeletons, but the arrangement and context were totally unfamiliar. We think of these specimens as unchanging data points in our understanding of past life, but in fact they have transformed repeatedly—they’ve been moved, reposed, and reinterpreted based on changing attitudes in scientific discourse, and sometimes, in response to political and cultural shifts in the world at large. These skeletons have been seen by tens of millions of people, but depending on which decade they visited in, the experience may have been entirely different.
The National Museum of Natural History’s fossil gallery, circa 1940. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
I soon discovered that information about how these exhibits had changed over time was not easy to come by. The stories were hidden away in out-of-print books, old scholarly articles, physical archives, and people’s memories. As I began researching the changing states of American fossil exhibits, it seemed worthwhile to use the platform I had created—this blog—to document the basics. And here we are, ten years later. I am enormously grateful to the archivists, scientists, historians, artists, and others who have shared their expertise and helped me along the way. It is my hope that the 50,000 or so people who stumble upon this site each year find it useful, informative, and (dare I say) eye-opening.
One of the biggest changes from where I was ten years ago is that I’m now on the inside, as it were. Now that I’m creating exhibits, I think my perspective has evolved a bit. In earlier posts, I was quick to criticize exhibits that glossed over certain details, or seemed to cater to the least-interested of visitors. These days, I’m more intrigued by the unique experiences that exhibits can create, and I’m convinced that it’s more important for exhibits to create enthusiasm than knowledge. I may even have to take another look at fossil sandboxes one day.
Some nerd with a really big toy—the life-sized model we created for SUE: The T. rex Experience. Photo by Katie Arnold.
Extinct Monsters isn’t going anywhere. I realize that personal blogs have been passé for ages, but I like the format and am sticking with it. There are plenty more stories to explore, so here’s to the next ten years.
To mark the occasion, here are ten articles that—typos aside—I’m still mostly pleased with.
The Epistemological Challenge of Model Whales
A 21st Century Hall of Mammals
The Diplodocus Seen ‘Round the World
EXTINCT MONSTERS 
This is an excellent article. Thank you for the ten years that you have put in, and here’s to the next ten! (raises invisible wine glass) Personally, I think that we desperately need to put the “muse” back in “museum”.
Thanks, Jason. I like that sentiment—museums should inspire!
You have honestly done a great job on this site. I seriously encourage you too write a book or make a TV/Netflix doco series about the subject as your probably one of the worlds top experts on the subject.
I’m serious, I’d buy such a book!
Thanks! I have a draft that I’ve been poking at for a while. Maybe this is the year I get it into shape.
You have my full moral support for it!
Keep it up, Ben! What you do here is both entertaining and important, a great combination.
Congratulations on the anniversary Ben. I greatly enjoy the blog – please keep it going! It offers a perhaps unique perspective on museum interpretation and display over time…
Thanks, Mark!
I’ve only known you for a short period of time, but I congratulate you on the years you’ve made of bringing to light an oft-under discussed but amazing subject and unsung heroes of science and culture; really, I enjoy so much of everything you’ve made. I actually take your commentary when it comes to museum design in mind.
If you don’t mind, I’m just gonna drop off some ideas you could write about in the future:
– The models of Sinclair Dinoland of the 64 World’s fair
– Any other of the many roadside dinosaur statues of America, like Dinosaur Park of Rapid City of South Dakota or the Cazabon Dinosaurs of California, and the cultural context of them
– The struggles of smaller regional/local museums during the COVID pandemic
– The history of the Tyrell Museum, in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. As of 2020, they’ve just renovated their cenozoic gallery.
Those are some great ideas!
Thank you.
– I used to dismiss both the Sinclair Dinoland models and Rapid City models.
Come to think of it, Ben could more broadly cover Emmet Sullivan, who designed not just
– Brian Engh’s dilophosaurus video gave me that idea.
– While I’ve only been to the Tyrell Museum on Google Maps, i’d give so much to go there.
No problem, here in New Zealand we have little too compare too, though I’ve seen the displays in London, Paris and New York, plus a few small ones.
I admit a soft spot for the 1964 Sinclair models after reading about them.
Links of interest, https://web.archive.org/web/20160410041139/http://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/sinclair-dinosaur/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150509070928/https://www.sinclairoil.com/history/worlds_fair_01.html
Type stuff up on YouTube too!
*Meant to say up there this:
… Not just Rapid City’s Dinosaurs, but also a statue of apatosaurus at the infamous Wall Drug tourist trap and a much larger and ambitious dinosaur attraction in Arksansas called Dinosaur World.
I love these ideas! I feel like the legacy and influence of the Sinclair models is so far-reaching it could be a whole book. Looking forward to the days when we can all travel and visit museums again. I had a whole Utah-Montana-Wyoming circuit planned for last summer that obviously couldn’t happen.
Waaay back in the early history of this blog, you wrote at https://extinctmonsters.net/diplodocus-and-camarasaurus/ that “As Boss and Stucker prepared the fossils, it became clear that they had the second most complete Camarasaurus ever found, with virtually all bones represented from the skull to the base of the tail”. Do you know, specifically, whether the neck is complete, including the atlas? And whether it was found articulated?
(It seems crazy that this specimen has never been described!)
According to the diagram in the new gallery, the neck is complete (although to achieve the rearing pose they had to give it an awkward kink). I didn’t realize it hadn’t been described, but I guess it had been half-buried in sandstone until a couple years ago. https://extinctmonsters.net/img_4290/
Hmm … that’s not much to go on. The atlas doesn’t show up well in such diagrams, and so far as I can make out it seems to suggest a gap in mid-neck.
It *is* a 2-inch diagram without super high-contrast colors. Matt Carrano would probably know, I know they spent a lot of time re-evaluating all the dinosaurs they remounted.
I emailed Matt about ten minutes ago 🙂