SEED magazine published Saved by Science, a wonderful portfolio of Australian-American artist Justine Cooper’s large-format photographs of what lurks behind the scenes of the American Museum of Natural History with an accompanying essay by Carl Zimmer.
I used to know Justine quite well in the early 90s in New York but have not seen her in about fifteen years. Her work displays the quality of wide-eyed curiosity about the world that I associate with my memory of her:
A natural history museum is really two museums, and when you?｢どｨび｢re in one of them, you can hardly imagine the other. I don?｢どｨび｢t know how many times I?｢どｨび｢ve wandered around the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, among the armored fish and the stegosaurs. But it wasn?｢どｨび｢t until I was a 26-year-old science writer that I had the chance to pass through to the other side. I wanted to learn about pterosaurs, those stork-faced, bat-bodied reptiles that soared for 150 million years. I found out about a Brazilian man named Alexander Kellner who was getting his Ph.D. at the museum, studying new fossils of pterosaurs from the Santana Formation. Kellner invited me to the museum, to take a look at the bones and talk about his ideas about what pterosaurs had actually been like in life.
I followed his directions and came to the Grand Gallery. I waited by the Great Canoe, and eventually a gangly paleontologist emerged from the acoustic fog of school groups on field trips. He led me through exhibit halls, and then, between two dioramas, he stopped. At first I thought he was lost in thought, and then maybe that he had forgotten something. There was no reason, after all, to stop by a dim wall between a pair of displays. But then I heard keys ringing in Kellner?｢どｨび｢s hand. He slipped one into an invisible lock, and the wall swung open. We slid through and Kellner locked the door behind us. I was in the other museum.
?｢どｨ?You?｢どｨび｢ve never been back here??｢どｨｬ Kellner asked. The answer was obvious; I was staring like a gob-smacked tourist at the rows of storage cabinets, which loomed overhead like wardrobes for giants. I knew that natural history museums kept fossils and other objects in storage, but I assumed that most of their material was on display, back in the other world. As we walked down long hallways, with drawer after drawer pressing in on either side, I realized how wrong I was.
Visiting the hidden side of natural history museums, where the vast collections of scientific specimens are kept by Carl Zimmer
Thank you Steve Silberman!