Paleontology Porn

One of the formative events of my early years, was my first visit to the American Museum of Natural History, shepherded by my grandmother, in 1955, at a time when my academic preparation had not yet included kindergarten.  It was all a wonder, to someone who had never previously been outside his native hamlet in Tennesee;  whose family owned no television (we were, in retrospect, what might have been called poor), and few books.  And the most striking feature, for a lad of that age, was (as you might expect) the great Hall of Dinosaurs.

What they might have done in the ensuring half-century, to tart the thing up, I do not know, and shudder to think.  But at the time, it stuck to The Facts.   Not Gradgrind facts, however, but huge facts, megaliths, a mystery in themselves.  The fossil bones were genuine;  their assemblage into the giant skeletons, while the work of man, was an informed work and quite certain, given the constraints of geometry and the extraordinarily complete preservation of the specimens they presented, the few missing bones being scrupulously filled in with artificial material of distinct coloration.  The fossil eggs, arranged in a clutch, were WYSIWYG, with no illustrative speculation as to the shape and structure of what once had lain inside.  The great hall, with its imposing high ceiling  (that in itself was beyond anything I had seen or fantasized before), was disceetly lit, and quite silent -- much like a church.   There were no voiceovers, animations, videos, push-button interactive displays, employees in dinosaur suits, or any other claptrap.  And it was very, very impressive.

True, there was a gift shop on a lower floor, where you could purchase small models of individuals dinosaurs in their hypothetical fleshly shape.  But even these were serious, as playthings went:  heavy and expensive (made of bronze, I believe), in realistic and now “Jurassic Park” dramatic postures, and studiously monochrome, the color of verdigris.  They were nothing like the zippy-dippy multi-colored cheap plastic throwaways available today, which are given in scads to quieten fretful children who then take them for granted, until they lie broken and neglected at the bottom of the overstuffed toybox;  no.   At the time, I could only afford one of them (a brontosaurus), and cherished it, as being much the most precious of my exiguous collection of toys (no more than three or four of them at the time;  my grandmother, in whose care I then dwelled, being of the old school);  yearned to someday also own a tyrannosaur, or a dimetrodon, or a triceratops (a wish not to be gratified for several years thence);  and it was a real blow when, one summer's day in the year of our lord 1955,  a neighbor boy  there in Garden City  walked off with it, and I never could get it back.

But one thing I never did lose was the sense of wonder at that vanished age, not disguised as anything more accessible or contemporary  by colorful conjectural “re-creations”;  a reverence for the scientific labor that had gone into discovering the fossils and digging them up, analyzing and measuring and painstakingly reassembling the detritus of the past;  and the beginnings of an appreciation for the concepts of evidence, and epistemology -- of conjecture and confirmation.

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A child who today should walk to such a place, after his taste has been jaded, and senses blunted, by repeated exposure to the loudly vocalizing twitching-twinkling  Technicolor full-flesh megamodels of the animatronic age, would no doubt be very little impressed by that spare and spartan room, not very different from the paleontologist’s own workshop:  any more than those born to a McMansion could but sniff at the tiny, falling-apart, government-built white-painted rented houses in which the scientists resided at that time in Oak Ridge.  Yet in those bungalows dwelt minds operating at the frontlines of physics and chemistry:  footsteps in which I have endeavored to follow, though Providence would ultimately ordain a somewhat different course.  (Though in another way I did return to those roots:  my father had “Q” clearance, and I…)

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Sad is the lot of laudator temporis acti.   And truly a great many scientific breakthroughs have taken place in America since those days, particularly in the fields of mathematics, computer science, and cosmology.  Yet I generally do not envy today’s children, encircled with pandering plastic.

Eheu, fugaces !