Monday, February 19, 2007

Museum of Jurassic Technology


The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a museum located at 9341 Venice Boulevard, in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California, USA. The museum claims to have a "specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities." This explains the museum's name and also suggests its puzzling nature, since the Lower Jurassic ended over 150 million years before the appearance of hominoids and in particular before anything that could be called technology .

Its catalog includes a mixture of artistic, scientific exhibits that evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 18th century predecessors of modern natural history museums. The museum was the subject of a book by Lawrence Weschler in 1995 entitled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and the museum's founder David Hildebrand Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2003. The museum claims to attract around 6,000 visitors per year. In 2004, a 35-minute documentary about the museum was produced entitled Inhaling the Spore.

The museum maintains a number of permanent exhibits including:

  • An exhibit on household myths of years past (for example, if a child holds a dying creature in his or her hands, that person will develop a tremor in their hands as an adult).
  • A collection devoted to trailer park culture, entitled "Garden of Eden On Wheels".
  • A collection of micro-miniature sculptures and paintings, such as a sculpture of Pope John Paul II carved from a single human hair and placed within the eye of a needle.
  • Microscopic collages depicting flowers and other objects, made entirely from individual butterfly wing scales.
  • A collection of stereographic photographs.
  • A small room dedicated to unusual letters and theories received by the Mount Wilson Observatory circa 1915–1935.

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