Little Shop Of Horrors II – Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict

Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict – Pink Floyd

The ancient lady holds the antlers up in one furrowed hand, and shakes them over her head like a trophy for the gnarly. 'See, this isn’t a tree – although it sure looks like a tree, don’t you agree? It looks like bark covered in moss. But it’s really bone, growing straight out of the moose’s skull. And sometimes when the moose fights with another moose, the antlers on his head break off. Just like that!' She makes a remarkably nimble cleaving gesture with both hands. Rip! Fretful field trip faces stare up at her from hip-height, hanging onto her every word, breathless. Twenty-something pairs of eyes gleam with excitement – including mine. Shredded antlers! Hostile moose whose furry mouths froth in agony, their skulls torn up and glistening - nature is not a happy place.

Behind the lady two life-size adult moose specimens loom, frozen in mid-battle inside a colorful diorama. Their antlers look unscathed, but you can tell it’s pure luck that their strange and instantaneous death happened when the clash was still at an early stage, so their antlers and heads were still in one piece when they were handed over to the taxidermist.
The moose's new half-dome home at the Museum of Natural History is like a snow globe for giants; I half expect a pair of monstrous hands to pick it up and shake it, for the bored amusement of watching the moose battle it out in a blizzard. A minute or two ago, I stumbled into this group of kids, as the lady was telling them that a grown moose can weigh up to 1,580 pounds – about twenty times the weight of an average eleven year old. Now I am trying to act casual and inconspicuous. Look at me, intently studying the pastel backdrop that makes for the combating moose’s perpetual arena, hands behind my back for fear of breaking anything invaluable. Inside, I am in turmoil. Is there any way for death and destruction not to ensue in this scenario?

'Ooh, now, don’t you worry', the title holder for Best Antler Storytelling In The World croons, to everyone’s relief. 'For the moose, losing an antler is just like losing a baby tooth. A new piece will grow back over time.' She holds the piece of defeated animal up one more time and slowly turns it left to right for everyone to see. 'Now', she concludes, 'Who wants to touch it?' Forty-something tiny hands swarm out from behind tiny backs, and up, reaching as high as they can, elbows fluttering, cheeks glowing. The smaller kids nearly get trampled in all this antler mayhem, but they don’t budge and they don’t care about their trodden toes. This is not the time to be delicate. Touching a real live bone from a real dead animal! Who doesn’t want a chance to do that?

New York's Museum of Natural History is pretty much the most magical place on earth, especially on a Tuesday morning. Kids swarm across the Hall of North American Mammals where Grizzly bears look ready to jump out of their private, seemingly endless dioramas to wreck dusty havoc. Families trip over each other to look four-million-year-old Lucy in the eye while storybook grandmothers and grandfathers disguised as museum guides tell the flocks about the history of all things, extinct or living. The museum is one of those rare, non-Disneyfied ones where the air is still a bit musty, and it hints of formaldehyde; the quarters and hallways hold endless secrets to discover in low lights and high ceilings. Mounted ferrets, mangy with age, their fierce poses dim from years of being overlooked; dinosaurs towering across mammoth halls, full-sized fossils strewn about; passages of native Indian totems rising like carved hydraulic platforms.

How poor and disappointing is a visit to the museum shop in conclusion of this incredible celebration of never-ending mortality that grabbed you by the throat, scratching, teeth saliving, from all floors. Ears tingling with excitement, nose filled with the smell of a billion years of evolution, you suddenly find yourself in the overly lit, exceedingly dust-free and horridly eco looking Museum Shop. Biodegradable Great White sharks the size of your hand don’t even remotely resemble the mega jaws you saw dangling off a ceiling earlier. You can build-your-own-origami-Cro-Magnon. A My First Excavating Set contains an undersized toothbrush and a tiny recyclable shovel, neatly fitted in with a miniature smiling dinosaur compressed in sand. The chewy models assure parents at first glance that the only excitement they will ever risk to evoke is the feeling of hurt wholesome pride as their kids toss them. Lame! The stuffed moose and bears are unexpectedly cuddly here, and fluffy, stripped of all fierceness and fang.
It's just not right. The entire museum is designed to show you that evolution is an incredible force, thrusting and thumping ruthlessly throughout the ages; that all nature – big or small – is honed to survive, eat, fuck, kill, die, and then do it all again. The museum shop tells you bears are cute. They like honey.

How did a museum with the world's largest collection of vertebrate fossils (nearly one million specimens) end up with such a sterile shop filled with fake, odorless crap? Sure, they have actual astronaut food (you can buy a freeze dried ice cream sandwich in a sealed bag), but that is fake, odorless crap to begin with. Has the evolution of political correctness got the better of the world’s natural history, too?