Blog 12: Museum of Jurassic Technology

The organization of the Museum of Jurassic Technology seemed rather like a maze to me, winding from one room to the next. I sometimes got lost due to the lack of apparent progression between the exhibits. Perhaps if I had read up on the museum before coming, I would have been less confused. I visited the museum’s website and read its page of introduction and realized that it had explained that in one of its exhibits closest to the entrance. But again, because it was not anymore prominently displayed than the photo of Noah’s arc on the other side of the entrance to the main museum, I did not pay the introduction video that much attention. The website eliminates the museum’s purpose:

“Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic"....

...The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. In its original sense, the term "museum" meant a spot dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs."

I’m still not completely sure how statues made small enough to fit inside the heads of needles are related to medieval paintings of religious figures, other than by allowing a man’s mind to attain a mood of aloofness. Perhaps the reason why it is so hard for me to grasp the concept of the museum is because I was raised in an era where methods of amusing ourselves are increasingly mindless – videogames, movies, television. The concept of the museum seems to be to make one think. Though, I don’t classify myself as one of the mindless followers of the era, the fact that I am more used to those methods of entertainment than museums of seemingly random displays is possibly the explanation for my confusion.


My favorite part of the museum was the exhibit on the pieces of art made of the scales of butterfly wings (see photo above). Henry Dalton, who lived from 1829-1911, created the pieces of art. Being the son of a physician, his skill with microscopes is not that surprising. After designing a slide, he would collect butterfly wings from all over the world, sort the scales by size, shape and color and then create his works of art. Some of Dalton’s micromosaics would require as many as one thousand individual butterfly scales.

I chose the butterfly wing scale pictures because they demonstrate technology’s ability to make seemingly useless pieces of the world into beautiful, if not useful commodities. While the creation of art from butterfly scales seems a rather useless pastime, the fact that it was possible as early as the mid-19th century is notable. It makes one think about how technology has advanced our society to the point where we have the spare time to muse over butterfly wing art.