The Armchair Museum Visitor

by elee Posted on February 3, 2013

No, I haven’t been visiting museums of armchairs. In fact, for the past couple of months, for unavoidable health reasons, I haven’t visited any museums at all, which is sad. But today, thanks to my Tumblr-mad little sister, I have totally immersed myself in a rather wonderful museum, which I plan to keep visiting at regular intervals over the next few museum-restricted months. The museum isn’t even local. It’s the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum at the University of Montana, USA.

The Brain ScoopThe reason that I, and thousands of other people around the world, have been able to visit this museum, is thanks to the tireless enthusiasm and astonishing hard work of it’s full-time volunteer curatorial assistant, Emily Graslie, and her rather wonderful Youtube channel The Brain Scoop, complete with accompanying Tumblr blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed (in case you’re wondering, a brain scoop is a sort of little spoon, used in taxidermy for… um… scooping brains). Honestly, I have been able to spend as much time exploring this museum and finding out about its collections, taxidermy preparation, and random natural history facts as I would if I visited the physical museum. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t have loved to visit the museum itself, (or in fact any museum) but just to say that there’s a huge amount of material in there, and that it’s totally enthralling. I’ve seen inside their cold room of pelts, admired their tank of dermestid beetles, looked in countless drawers of skulls and skeletons, and been with them in their truck to collect a frozen wolf carcass.

What Emily and her fellow volunteers have manage to do is a near-perfect job of engagement through social media. As far as I can tell, they’ve managed this because they both take the job very seriously, whilst having a massive amount of fun doing it, and also by, really, REALLY caring about the museum, it’s collections, research, and natural history in general. As is demonstrated by their thousands of loyal followers, their enthusiasm is totally infectious. This is not least because they diligently respond to huge numbers of questions, comments, and photos, drawing more and more people into the conversation.

What makes this even more amazing is that the Philip L. Wright Museum is actually just a few storage rooms, hidden away on the second floor of the University of Montana. It’s so desperately short of money that the spirit collection (i.e. the jars of pickled animals) has lived for seven years in cardboard boxes on the floor of a dusty room across the campus. The museum has 1.5 members of staff, and only the part-time curator is paid. But volunteer Emily is so passionate about the museum that huge numbers of online followers now send messages asking what they can do to help the place raise money, and sending design ideas for merchandise. She also does a fantastic job of drumming up enthusiasm for natural history museums more generally, featuring her own and other people’s photos of them on the Tumblr blog.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment in museums about social media and online participation (see, for example, the work of Nina Simon). But plenty of museums, whilst trying to show willing, really do quite a half-arsed job. I suspect the Philip L. Wright Museum has struck gold with Brain Scoop for a few reasons. First, because it’s fronted by an intelligent, enthusiastic and attractive young presenter. Second, because it plugs into the current trend for geek culture, where learning about weird subjects like taxidermy is considered cool (which, as we all know, it is). Thirdly, because they really get the language of the internet (memes, gifs, lols and suchlike). Fourthly, because everything is well designed and produced, and looks great. And fifthly, because they never stop responding to their followers.

So Emily’s Youtube videos and blog appeal not only to converted museum geeks like me, but to all sorts of people who have stumbled across, loved, and shared them throughout the world of social media. Now normally it’s me who hauls my family members to museums. But this time, because of the social media phenomenon that is The Brain Scoop, my little sister was able to repay me the favour. And I’m delighted that she did.

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Seeing Voices in the Museum

by elee Posted on October 7, 2012

Human beings are incredibly social animals. This manifests itself in a whole host of ways—from our desire to share ideas and conversation, to our tendency to see agency and intention in inanimate objects (‘my computer hates me’), to our ability to form relationships with everything from people, to cats, to cars. If museums are clever, they can make use of this inherent sociability to create some really compelling exhibitions.

This was revealed to me particularly on a recent visit to Manchester Museum, where I was delighted to have a good chunk of time in which to explore the new Living Worlds gallery, which reopened last year. I had been wanting to go ever since seeing the old gallery in 2010 and hearing that the redesign was going to be carried out in association with a fashion design company (catwalk show producers Villa Eugenie). I’d heard good things about the new gallery since it opened, and had been looking for an excuse to travel up to Manchester and see it for myself.

The museum was limited to some extent in what it could do to the gallery, because the wooden-framed cases are listed, and so can’t be removed. But sometimes limitations such as these can force designers to be much more imaginative, which is certainly true here. The thirteen cases cover an eclectic range of themes, from ‘Humans’, to ‘Weather’, and from ‘British Wildlife’, to ‘Domination’, and each case is topped with a very trendy looking neon sign.

The design is, as it darned well should be with a fashion company putting it together, beautiful, imaginative and visually arresting. But what actually struck me was the humanity of the exhibition—it positively seemed to chatter with different voices, and to draw out relationships wherever it could.

As I looked around I quickly noticed that many of the text panels were attributed to named people outside of the museum (fellow museum folks will know it is a sure sign of incurable museum geekery when you start obsessing over museum labels). I’ve come across this approach before, and it seems to be getting more popular (for example at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC). It’s a fantastic thing to do for several reasons. For starters, it takes away the unnamed curatorial ‘voice of God’, which rather dangerously suggests that the museum is an unquestionable authority on everything upon which it speaks. Secondly, in this case at least, it allows the museum to link back to Manchester University, of which it is a part, allowing some of the academics to speak directly on their areas of expertise, and giving them a chance to communicate directly with the public. And thirdly, it allows the labels to be written in the first person, and to convey the real, personal enthusiasm that these people have for their subjects.

But from my perspective, it wasn’t only people who were communicating in the gallery—the animals were doing it too. During my research with children in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, I noticed that the children seemed particularly drawn to animals (models, taxidermy or skeletons) that showed signs of sociability—those which were facing each other, or chasing each other, or which generally looked like they were up to something. I suspect this is our social natures coming out again, that we are inherently more interested in groups of beings (human or otherwise) that look as if they are interacting in some way, rather than those which are neatly lined up and staring at nothing. Our sociable brain wants to know what is going on—do they like each other? Is one going to eat the other? Whose side are we on?

The exhibition designers at Manchester Museum managed to bring out this sociability brilliantly. Groups of animals clustered together in the ‘Connect’ case as if meeting for a counsel of beasts, whilst in the ‘Variety of Life’ case, the various mammals and birds seemed to be looking out at the visitors as if it were we, not they, who were on display.

Taxidermy is a weird business, hovering as it does between art and science, and the semblance of life with absolute death. Some might argue that taxidermy specimens are there to study, and emotion should be left out of it, so that lines of skins are more scientifically appropriate than dioramas. But for me, emotional connection is a big part of what makes me want to study. There is a value to helping people to feel connected to these animals, and appealing to our social natures is most definitely an effective way to do this.

By the time I left, (having photographed every case and text panel), I felt hugely impressed by the new display. From the written voices of the experts on the text panels, to the implied voices of the animals, the exhibition genuinely spoke to me. And all of this without making a sound.

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Evolution galleries: Humans and other animals

by elee Posted on September 16, 2012

I’ve been interested in human evolution ever since spending time learning about it during my Human Sciences degree in the late nineties, so whenever I’m in a museum with a human evolution gallery, my antennae start quivering. I’ve visited a couple in the USA over the past few years — one in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and, last year, in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I just love the idea of looking back at our ancestors, and also of being reminded that over the past few million years other species of humans and hominids have existed, often in parallel with each other.

I’m used to seeing these galleries, or even the single human evolution cases in some museums, presenting the various human species on their own, or maybe alongside a few other primates. The museums nip off a single twig of the evolutionary tree, usually starting with modern humans evolving from something like an australopithecus, and maybe hinting that these evolved from an earlier primate species. These exhibitions typically display lots of skulls and models, showing how modern humans gradually evolved from our primate and hominid ancestors.

But I visited a human evolution gallery recently that made me think again about the ways that human evolution generally seems to be presented. This was in the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, Stockholm’s natural history museum. In this museum the party was open to way more than just primates, including deer, elephants and even an alarming-looking giant prehistoric bird and a sabre-toothed cat. And the primates on display weren’t just there to represent the evolutionary twig of our distant ancestors, but made up a big, bushy, diverse evolutionary branch, amongst which we humans are only one of a whole range of successful (as in, extant) species. Other animals helped show what the hominid environment must have been like, or demonstrated concepts such as ‘what is a species?’.

I realised I was strangely pleased that the human evolution gallery had decided to open its doors to other species too. There are a couple of reasons why this is a great approach. Firstly, while human evolution is a really important topic, and most definitely deserves plenty of gallery space (for example to counter those who believe that humans were created rather than evolved), totally separating ourselves from other animals gives the impression that we are somehow distinct from the rest of the living world.

But secondly, I think the human-only evolution galleries tend to imply the ‘march of progress’ view of human evolution — you know the one, illustrated by the line of hominids, starting with the stooped ape, and ending with the splendid, upright, if rather beardy man. While I have no doubt the curators would denounce this suggestion, the human-only galleries do imply that humans started out as rather, well, sub-human, and gradually got better and better at being human until we ended up as the iphone-wielding, museum-visiting marvels that we are today.

In Stockholm, on the other hand, I very much received the message that we are only one of a whole plethora of species that exist at the end of a whole plethora of branches and twigs of the evolutionary tree, and that, at least from an evolutionary perspective, we are all as valuable and interesting as each other. It’s a subtle difference, but one that’s really worth other museums thinking about.

(N.B. I almost ended this blog post with a rant about evolution being a process that doesn’t care or make value judgements about complexity or human ideas of improvement, but only about surviving to pass on genes. But I’ve decided to spare you — there are plenty of places on the internet you can go to read rants about evolution. I’ll stick to ranting about museums.)

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Lost in Science

by elee Posted on September 11, 2012

Yesterday I was in London for a meeting, and managed to carve out a couple of hours to visit the Science Museum. Given that I spent eight years of my life working in science museums, and that I now research museums, it was a shock to realise that it’s probably been over half a decade since I’ve visited the UK’s largest and most famous museum of science.

In spite of the fact that I inevitably get lost there, my first mistake was failing to pick up a map as I came in. I really wanted to visit the new climate science gallery, Atmosphere, which I’d heard lots about, and also to check out the hands-on Launchpad gallery, which I was pretty sure had moved again since I last visited. Coming into the museum, I turned right and walked in a long straight line, through the massive industrial and transport exhibitions, and into the dark, neon-filled Wellcome Wing. There was some sort of event, and large numbers of trendy looking men in shirts and ties were milling around. I am hopelessly easy to disorientate (turn me through ninety degrees and I’m lost), but eventually discovered a lift, with signs suggesting I would find Atmosphere if I went up to floor 2.

The Science Museum seems to contain an inordinate number of industrial-looking corridors, which don’t quite feel like places visitors should be, as if you’ve wrongly managed to get behind the scenes and into the staff areas. I stepped from the lift into one such corridor and gingerly made my way to the Atmosphere gallery. It was, again, dark, with appropriately atmospheric deep blue lighting from an incredible swirling ceiling, and amazing slowly-moving projections on the floor. I didn’t have much time, and needed to take it in quickly, so I tried out a few of the computer interactives, looked at some of the artefacts, then left to try to find Launchpad. I followed an industrial looking, behind-the-scenes feeling staircase back down to the ground floor, elbowed my way through the trendy tie-wearers, and headed for the basement, where I thought Launchpad had been last time I visited.

Instead I found myself in Web Lab Beta – an interactive gallery produced in association with Google Chrome. The middle of the space was filled with strange instruments, making weird pinging, bonging sounds. In other places, robot arms drew faces in sandpits, and people looked through periscopes at goodness knows what. A cordoned off area declared itself to be the Control Room, with fat yellow cables connecting to the internet. At this point all the technology and trendily designed dark spaces filled with bright lights started to overwhelm me. I located the nearest museum employed human being, and asked where I could find Launchpad.

Inevitably, this involved another long corridor, although at least this one had lots of things along it to reassure me that I wasn’t in the staff quarters. I made it up to the museums’ other third floor (see why I get confused?), along another corridor (or maybe my mind is now just adding corridors…) and found myself with three choices: Launchpad; Health Matters; and, (thank the Lord!) the Eighteenth Century Science gallery, with its King George III collection of scientific instruments. And, although I thought I had been searching for the hands-on Launchpad gallery, I realised that what I actually wanted was to hang out for a while with some calm, beautiful, gently-lit orreries.

I’m so glad the Science Museum still has the George III gallery. It’s easy to be wowed by the high-concept design of galleries like Atmosphere and Web Lab. They are fantastically well done, and based on some of the best visitor research carried out by museums in this country. And the industrial and transport galleries, with their columns of cars up the wall, and giant, swooping aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling, can’t fail to impress. But these galleries, filled with lights, sounds, giant objects and crowds of people, combined with the perpetual feeling of being lost or soon-to-be-lost, give me a kind of sensory overload that just makes me want to run away. But a small, calm room, in which absolutely every beautifully made object is behind glass, and in which there is no touching, interacting or even listening, was the perfect antidote. Science engagement isn’t just about doing hands-on stuff, or being wowed, or having your senses filled, or using technology. It’s also about having the time to calmly observe, let your mind wander, and notice tiny details or appreciate simple ideas that aren’t shouting, but are quietly waiting to be discovered.

After 15 minutes in there, control was regained, normal service resumed, and I was sufficiently revived to hurtle round another five galleries in the 40 minutes before my meeting. And I didn’t get lost at all.

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Shelves of Zebras

by elee Posted on August 9, 2012

This lovely display of zebras can be found at the Natural History Museum’s outpost at Tring. It’s a delightful museum, built around the collections of Walter Rothschild, a classic British eccentric aristocrat. There are pictures of Rothschild riding around on giant tortoises, with a lettuce leaf held out on a stick to encourage them to walk, and another of him in a carriage pulled by zebras (I don’t know if any of the ones in the picture pulled his carriage…).

Rothschild decided aged seven that he would run a zoological museum. This makes me feel a certain affinity towards him, as I too had childhood yearnings towards museums, as proven by a school exercise book from around 1989, in which I declared that by the year 2000 I would be working in a museum (I was out by 1 year — it was 2001 when I got my first museum job).

But back to the zebras… What I love about this display is the way that it strikes a balance between ordinariness and weirdness. In almost any natural history museum that you care to visit, you will find specimens displayed like this, on glass shelves at various heights in a class cabinet. But what is odd about this one is a) the animals are all quite large, and b) they are all the same type of animal. Plus, the taxidermy is so beautifully done that they have a certain nonchalant quality, as if they just happen to be hanging around in a museum display case.

I noticed during my research in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History that young children often notice or imagine relationships between taxidermied animals. Displays like the one above are great for this — you don’t need anything as obvious as a diorama to imagine something going on between the animals. Even a technique as simple as facing some animals towards each other and some away creates a strangely compelling social scene.

But what’s also lovely about this display is that it somehow has the feel of a work of art, but without the affectation of art. It is essentially a comparative study of zebra species, and yet within this display we also have aesthetic appeal, surprise, narrative and wit. Or am I just getting overexcited by some shelves of zebras?

(This post builds on a post that originally appeared on my now-defunct Tumblr blog Stuffed Stuff)

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Welcome to the gallery of the real

by elee Posted on July 22, 2012

Some time last year I was in a natural history gallery with a Natural History Museum educator from the USA. I asked her, “What question do children most commonly ask in your museum?”, already anticipating that the answer would be, “Is it real?”. I was right, of course, with children’s favoured question number two, on both sides of the pond, being, “Did you kill it?”.

The world over, young children seem to be totally baffled by taxidermy. A couple of months ago I visited the Oxford University Museum of Natural History with my two nephews, aged seven and four. They spent most of the visit trying to get their heads around the relationship between ‘real’, ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. “But when are we going to see the real ones?”, they kept asking. And they weren’t convinced by my patient, rational response that these were real, they were just the skins of dead animals that someone had stuffed to make them look alive. To the boys, ‘real’ meant ‘alive’.

This confusion isn’t just limited to young children. When I worked at Thinktank, Birmingham’s science museum, a teenage girl once pointed to the taxidermy display and asked me, “Miss, are those animals real?”. When I replied that they were, she then asked, “Miss, how do you make them stay so still?”.

Museum curators and educators can be either amused or exasperated by these questions. But it’s worth remembering that at its heart is children’s real desire to make sense of their world. I recently read an interesting journal article that took an evolutionary psychology approach to exploring children’s understandings of death.* The authors argued that, throughout human (and pre-human) history, it has been important for people to distinguish dead animals from those that are still alive (either because they might be good to eat, or because they might be wanting to eat you). If this need has had any impact on the development of our brains, then we should expect children to assume that an animal is alive, and remain suitably vigilant towards it, unless they have good evidence that it isn’t. This evidence might, for example, be that they saw the animal being killed, or that they can see that its head is missing and there is blood everywhere.

This would certainly explain children’s confusion concerning taxidermy, where there is some evidence of the animals being alive (standing up, eyes open, no bits missing), and some evidence of them being dead (not moving, adults around them acting as if the animal is not alive). Given this conflicting evidence, children spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sense of exactly what is going on with these weird, lifelike, deathlike animals.

This effort to explain taxidermy leads to some children making some impressive logical leaps. I saw one particularly brilliant example in Tenby Museum, in Pembrokeshire, Wales, a couple of years ago, one little corner of which is shown in the above photograph.

Two children, a girl aged around six years and her older brother, were discussing this rather eccentric display of seashore wildlife, rather charmingly displayed in an alcove behind a shop curtain, and under a handy sign, should anyone be unsure what they are looking at. They were arguing fiercely about the ‘realness’ of the animals, with the little girl insisting they were real, while her brother insisted they weren’t. In the end she trumped him with her little sisterly logic:

“They are real,” she declared, “but their owner is being paid by the museum to make them stay still.”

 

(This post builds on a post that originally appeared on my now-defunct Tumblr blog Stuffed Stuff)

* H. Clark Barrett & Tanya Behne (2005) Children’s understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death, Cognition 96 (2) pp93-108.

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Small town museums, or museums of small towns?

by elee Posted on July 14, 2012

Today we escaped the hustle and bustle of big city (ok, Leicester) life, and headed down to the pretty little town of Market Harborough, in search of charity bookshops, cake and the wonders of its local museum. Harborough Museum was full of visitors having a great time – kids (ok, and some grown-ups) dressing up and exploring baskets of toys, and lots of people reading finding out about local life and the history of the town. But it did make me wonder: why do small town museums focus almost universally on their local area?

Now, I’m no expert on the history of museums, so I’m sure there will be lots of people out there who can correct me on this. But I was under the impression that museums, and the collections they originated from, came about because of an interest in the wider world. This may have been due to an individual’s interest in ‘the exotic’, or it may have been because a group, such as a Lit and Phil Society, had an educational agenda. For example, Leicester’s New Walk Museum has, amongst other things, an Ancient Egypt collection, German Expressionist art, and Natural History from around the globe.

Were these collections of ‘not from round here’ things only ever found in bigger city museums? Have the small town museums always been concerned with charting their own history, and nothing beyond? Or was there some point in the 20th Century when these small town museums (or maybe the town Councils that ran them) decided that anything that wasn’t directly connected to their own locale was outside of their ‘collections policy’ and must therefore (rather sinisterly, in the museum parlance) be disposed of?

It’s not that I have anything against finding out about a town’s history. Harborough Museum has recently done a fantastic job of displaying the Hallaton Treasure, a haul of Roman coins found by a metal detectorist in Leicestershire in 2000. The exhibition was nicely done and interesting, and we had fun trying on replica Roman helmets. And of course, looking back at times past is certainly a way of stepping outside of the here and now.

Or at least a way of stepping outside of the ‘now’. But these small museums rarely step outside of the ‘here’. Maybe there isn’t the physical space, but it does give the impression that they simply aren’t interested. There’s so much world out there; why should these museums be so concerned with navel gazing? Are people in small towns so lacking in a sense of self that they need this historical reassurance, and nothing else? Don’t they, and their children, deserve to find out about the world beyond the green belt? Or do we now think that all of this can be done through TV, the internet, and foreign holidays, and that these museums should only be concerned with a narrowly geographical focus on history?

I know now is probably not the time to be calling for massive change to small town museums. Heaven knows, with all the funding cuts, they have enough to deal with. But in the longer term I’d love to see them just show a little bit more excitement and interest in the world outside. I want to go to one of these museums and be genuinely surprised by what I find there, and to feel like that museum has actually expanded my own world.

Just because a museum is named after a town, it doesn’t mean that that town needs to be the only subject in the museum. Does it? Surely it should be a museum for the town, as well as a museum of the town. Or are there lots of smaller museums out there that manage this, and I’ve just not been to them? Come on, Museoscope readers, prove me wrong!

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Biophobophilia, or, why children (sort of) love big, pointy teeth

by elee Posted on July 6, 2012

During the course of my research at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. This may not come as a surprise to those of you with children, or who actually remember being a child, but it seems that children really love animals with scary teeth. In this particular museum, the favourites seem to be a large stuffed crocodile, and a model T. rex head.

My PhD research involves getting 4- and 5-year-old children to photograph things they like in the museum, and then talk to me about the pictures. Two thirds of the children photographed this head. And when it was mentioned in interviews, children often told me that they liked it (it was sometimes a favourite), that they liked it’s sharp teeth, and that they had put their hands in its mouth or touched its teeth.

So the children talk about it as something scary, but in a fun way. Like Jurassic Park, they seem to know it isn’t real, but still appreciate it’s scariness, albeit in an entertaining manner.

But I saw something slightly different when I did observations in the gallery. Some children seemed genuinely scared of it. Parents would try to get children’s photos taken with the T. rex, and the children would back away, shake their heads, sometimes even cry. It seemed to be actually, genuinely frightening.

At one point, I saw some parents trying to get their little boy to go up to it, which he refused to do. I joined in the conversation, saying that I thought it was pretty scary (it had actually scared me earlier in the day – they had moved it so that it was now on the base of the T. rex skeleton, and in this new position it caught me unawares). The boy stopped to think about this. And then he decided on a course of action. He would subdue the beast. He reached into his pocked, took out a box of tic-tacs, and held up a sweet to the mouth of the T. rex.

I think there’s something really interesting going on with all of this. E. O. Wilson talks about Biophilia – the innate love of certain elements of nature that humans feel, due to our evolutionary history. For example, we are attracted to the landscapes that are most conducive to our survival, or to animals, which we needed to understand to be able to hunt. The flip-side is biophobia – our innate propensity to fear animals such as spiders and snakes, which were threatening to our survival.

So, because words are fun, I’ve coined the phrase ‘biophobophilia’ to describe the situation above. In this word, I want to capture both the sense of children simultaneously loving and fearing scary creatures, but also, the sense that they actually enjoy their fear.

In fact, the fascination with scary animals makes perfect evolutionary sense. The children needed to avoid being eaten by these animals, but the way that humans (and other animals) stay safe, is by learning about our foes. Being nervous of something, whilst also being motivated to look at it and learn about it is actually a really effective way of making sure we don’t get eaten by it.

So while the children (sort of) know that the things they see in the museum can’t really eat them, in the dark recesses of their brain, biophobophila keeps these modern, urban children, who are more likely to be killed by a car than a crocodile, totally fascinated by big, sharp, scary teeth.

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Observation Notes: Not All Bones are Dinosaurs

by elee Posted on July 1, 2012

Elephant skeletons

Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a lot of time at the wonderful Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where I’m carrying out my PhD research. Although the bulk of my research has involved getting four- and five-year-olds to take photographs for me (as I described in my very first post), I have spent almost as much time wandering around and around the museum, observing visitors more generally.

I really love doing observations. I think it’s easy to imagine that most museum visits are quite mundane – we see the other visitors milling around, or we mill around ourselves, and everything blends into the hubbub of the crowds. But when you start paying attention to the individual conversations, you see that actually the museum glitters with gems of quirky conversation and idiosyncratic behaviour that reveal the individuality of each visitor’s experience.

My approach is definitely one of participant-observer than invisible social scientist. I find it almost impossible to stand back and blend in with the furniture while carrying out observations. Actually, I’m not even sure this is possible in the museum – a semi-social space where we are all on public display, and the behaviour of other people can be as fascinating as the exhibitions. I’ve found that sitting with a clip-board actually makes me stand out more than just hanging around and occasionally making comments to other visitors as I might do were I a visitor myself.

So some time last year, I found myself having the following conversation as I stood by the large skeletons in the photograph above. A small boy looked at the skeletons, then turned to me, a random adult, and asked, “What sort of dinosaurs are they?”

“They’re elephants,” I replied.

“Elephant dinosaurs,” he said.

“No,” I said, “they’re elephant skeletons. You know we all have bones in our bodies?” He nodded, suspiciously. “Well,” I said, “these are the bones from inside an elephant.”

The boy narrowed his eyes, looked at the skeletons, looked at me and then walked away. Clearly, I was deeply misguided. He was in a museum. Museums are for dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are giant skeletons. Heck, there’s a giant T. rex stood right in the middle of the museum. Stupid lady.

I hope I didn’t ruin his day. It’s a tough moment in a boy’s life when he comes to realise that not all skeletons are dinosaurs.

Ah, the ethical minefields of social research!

(A version of this post originally appeared on my now-defunct Tumblr blog Stuffed Stuff)

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