Went to the Canadian Museum of Nature today. Good stuff. Started of course with the dinosaur exhibit.

Once upon a time the quality of a museum exhibit might depend on the rarity and completeness of the fossils in its collection. Nowadays those exhibits aren’t so much about the possession of physical things. Museums have long used a kind of information abstraction and re-presentation by putting plaster casts of fossils on display, and keeping the delicate real deal in the basement. Today we saw imposing fossils that might or might not have had their originals stored in Ottawa, but we also saw:

• A reconstruction of a rare proto-seal skeleton, assembled by a 3d printer from a model generated from a laser scan of actual fossilized remains.
• A collection of convincing computer animations of dinosaurs, nicely directed for dramatic effect and storyline but also demonstrating movement kinetics, interaction with their local ecosystem and collective behaviour, things that a static display of animal parts can’t do well.

Puijila darwini: not a fossil.

The museum was kind of a place for storing paleontological artifacts that you couldn’t see other places. But it was more of a venue for high-production-value information visualization. Worked for me