Museum of Jurassic Technology facts for kids
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a super unique museum located at 9341 Venice Boulevard in the Palms area of Los Angeles, California. It was started in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson. The museum says it's "dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic." What "Lower Jurassic" means for the museum's collections is a bit of a mystery, which is part of its charm!
The museum's collection is a mix of art, science, history, and items that are hard to put into any category. It reminds visitors of old "cabinets of curiosities" from the 1500s. These were like early versions of today's natural history museums. Many of the things you see at the museum might make you wonder if they are real, leading to lots of different ideas about what the museum is all about.
In 2001, David Hildebrand Wilson received a special award called a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
Exploring the Museum
The Museum of Jurassic Technology has a very unusual collection of exhibits. Some people wonder how real or authentic the objects are. Edward Rothstein, a critic for The New York Times, once called it a "museum about museums." He said it makes you constantly ask, "what kind of place is this?"
Smithsonian magazine described it as a "witty, self-conscious homage to private museums of yore." This means it's a clever tribute to the private museums of the past. Back then, natural history was still being explored by science, and museums were more like those old "cabinets of curiosity." The Economist added that the museum "captures a time... when science mingled with poetry." This means it shows a time when science and art mixed together to find answers to life's big questions.
Lawrence Weschler wrote a book in 1995 called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, And Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. This book tries to explain the mystery of the museum. Weschler explored the museum deeply by talking with its founder, David Wilson. He also did his own research on several exhibits. His investigations showed that some exhibits seemed to be from Wilson's imagination, while others might actually fit in a natural history museum.
According to David Wilson, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is "a museum interested in presenting phenomena that other natural history museums are unwilling to present." In other words, it shows things that other museums might not.
The museum's opening slideshow explains that the word "museum" originally meant "a spot dedicated to the Muses." This was a place where people's minds could rise above everyday worries. Following this idea, the museum has dim lighting, old-fashioned wood and glass display cases, and a maze-like layout. Visitors walk through a wide range of exhibits on art, natural history, the history of science, philosophy, and anthropology. It especially focuses on the history of museums and the many ways we can gain knowledge. About 25,000 people visit the museum each year.
Museum Exhibits
The museum has more than thirty exhibits that are always on display. Here are some of them:
- The Delani/Sonnabend Halls: This exhibit tells the story of an opera singer named Madalena Delani and a thinker named Geoffrey Sonnabend. Sonnabend had a three-part idea called Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter. He believed that memory is something we create to protect ourselves from the sad truth that time passes and moments are gone forever. He showed this idea with a complex drawing of a plane cutting through a cone.
- Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition: This exhibit displays old-fashioned cures and remedies from before modern science.
- The Garden of Eden on Wheels: This section features collections from trailer parks in the Los Angeles area.
- The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian: This is a collection of tiny sculptures. Each one is carved from a single human hair and placed inside the eye of a needle! You can see sculptures of Goofy, Pope John Paul II, and Napoleon I. Other tiny artworks include violins, dancers, a crucifix (made from the artist's own hair and gold), and cartoon characters like Donald Duck, Pinocchio, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There's also a self-portrait, a golf player, and a baseball player swinging a bat.
- Micromosaics of Harold "Henry" Dalton: These are tiny mosaics from the 1800s. They show flowers, animals, and other objects. They are made entirely from tiny butterfly wing scales and diatoms (a type of algae).
- The Stereofloral Radiographs of Albert G. Richards: This is a collection of special X-ray images of flowers that look 3D.
- Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay: This exhibit shows a collection of old, falling-apart dice that once belonged to the famous magician Ricky Jay. He wrote about them in his book Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck.
- No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory: This is a small room dedicated to unusual letters and strange theories that were sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935.
- The World is Bound with Secret Knots: The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher: This exhibit explores the many different subjects, writings, and inventions of a 17th-century Jesuit scholar. He was a very smart person who founded the Kircherian Museum in Rome.
- The Lives of Perfect Creatures: The Dogs of the Soviet Space Program: This is a gallery of oil paintings showing the brave dogs who were part of the Soviet space program.
- Fairly Safely Venture: String Figures from Many Lands and their Venerable Collectors: This exhibit features different string figures (like cat's cradle) from around the world and the people who collected them.
From 1992 to 2006, some of the museum's collection was also shown in a partner museum in Hagen, Germany, called the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum.
Other Cool Features
In 2005, the museum opened its Tula Tea Room. This is a Russian-style tea room where visitors can enjoy Georgian tea and cookies. The cost is included in your admission ticket. This room is a small copy of the study of Tsar Nicolas II from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. The tea room is also home to several live doves and other birds.
The Borzoi Kabinet Theater shows a series of poetic documentaries. These films are made by the Museum of Jurassic Technology with a group from St. Petersburg, Russia, called Kabinet. The film series is called A Chain of Flowers. Its name comes from a quote by Charles Willson Peale: "The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life." The films include Levsha: The Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea (2001), Obshee Delo: The Common Task (2005), Bol'shoe Sovietskaia Zatmenie: The Great Soviet Eclipse (2008), The Book of Wisdom and Lies (2011), and Language of the Birds (2012).
