Make the Grand Gallery of Evolution evolve

Make the Grand Gallery of Evolution evolve

or how could the MNHN be improved

Paris’s museum of natural history is a historic place as well as a nice museum. Basically, its Grand Gallery of Evolution shows stuffed animals and gives some information about the species in a small text. Here is how I perceived it and how I would improve it.

                A museum made for children? Put more science in it!

To my mind, this museum was mostly thought for children. The first floor is the one with all the “cute” stuffed animals – a sort of zoo, but with dead animals. On the higher floors, where children may not always go because they are already tired with this huge first floor, there is more explanation on evolution and the objects exhibited are less visually impressive. Another argument in that sense is that the texts attached to the objects are short and simple. For example, we do not see the scientific name of the animals. Why forget the most accurate way to describe the presented object? Maybe because this is of no use for children who do not know what it refers to, they wouldn’t understand that Loxodonta Africana simply means elephant. Finally, there temporary exhibits clearly aims for an under 12 year-old public.

         Stop egocentricity: plants also evolve!

Another thing we can notice is that it almost only deals with animals. I do not remember of having seen any plant. Ok, it would be hard to stuff plants, but why isn’t this huge part of living organisms represented? They evolved at least as much as we did! At least if the museum was called the Grand Gallery fo Animal Evolution, I would have understood…

         Bring common ancestors back to life?

Now if I had to build a museum that shows evolution, I would insist on something that is not mentioned in this museum: the common ancestors. They are the key points to how today’s species are related, but they are not identified. Although scientific, a museum remains a place where you can show crazy ideas, so why not recreate common ancestors? It would be a way to visualize what the common ancestors to for example frog and gorilla could have looked like. Of course this is not a rigorous reconstitution, but isn’t doing hypothesis an important part of doing science? Plus, it would be a way to highlight evolutive adaptations (opposable thumbs, claws, backbone, etc).

All of this is of course strongly linked to my vision of evolution and what I find most fascinating in it. The same work of deciding what is to show was done when building this museum, and the choices made are not better nor worse than those I would have done – they just aim at something a bit different. One last thing: if you, English-reader of this blog post, want to visit this museum, make sure you can read a bit of French. None of the texts are translated…

Dara