Drawing with Darwin

131 Once or twice a year my husband and I make the trek from our cozyhill-boundstreetinsouthwestVirginiatothehubbubofWashington DC, about seven hours northeast. In twenty years of visits, I have never missed a pilgrimage to the Natural History Museum, where I often fantasize about being locked in the dinosaur hall at night, when all’s tombquiet and someone forgets to turn off the spotlights, so the huge white bones light up like prehistoric sculpture. Or like a primeval open book. But on the most recent trip, as usual, I was jostled along by hordes of people. All the kids with their digital cameras flocked around Tyrannosaurus rex like paparazzi, gawking at the king of carnivores through Drawing with Darwin suzanne stryk NONFICTION 132 Ecotone: reimagining place their LCD screens. When I finally did get to look at the colossal relic, its toothy grin and dangling paws struck me as sort of funny—like a parody of a dainty thug. Near T. rex arched the outlandishly fanned back of the stegosaurus. Behind it an immense diplodocus’s ungainly neck terminated in what seemed a proportionally tiny pea of a head. What was evolution thinking ? No one will ever know that, but I do know what I was thinking: The Triassic period sure gave us a lot to ogle. Wandering into the calmer hall of mammals, I paused before a little fossil primate no bigger than my cat. Its long serpentine tail dangled limply, like a bicycle chain, its gangly limbs gripping a branch as if it were perfectly natural for a skeleton to climb a tree. Well, isn’t everything supposed to be natural in a natural history museum? I’d passed this specimen many times on previous visits, but that day Smilodectes gracilis struck me in a peculiar way, for here was an ancestor snugly crouched in a branch of my own family tree. Here was a creature with a bony armature not unlike mine or any of the other hominids shuffling around the room. 133 suzanne stryk All around me men, women, and children peered down to study slabs of crushed bird skeletons or shadowy insects in gray rock—all beautiful despite their smashed-by-a-truck-on-the-asphalt postures. Some people craned their necks up at the Eocene bones of Uintatheres, a clumsylooking mammal with a head full of bumpy horns. Nine feet tall reared up on its hind legs, the beast impressed me as a Dr. Seuss character in search of a story. If some “intelligent life form” had pointed a telescope toward the earth at the beginning of the Paleocene, would it have predicted that mammals would fair so well when sighting this big-boned klutz? At that moment, the entire room became an animated display, as viewers , bones, and backdrops of blue-skied dioramasmingledtogether.Whatwould a wall text say about the living primates in my imagined exhibit? Maybe some plain facts about Homo sapiens—that they stand erect on two legs, that they have huge brains and binocular vision. But how would a curator explain why we humans ramble around exhibit halls peering at displays of animal bones in the first place? What evolutionary motive could be offered for this weird behavior? Of course, not everyone was studying the fossils. In the shadow of a giant flightless bird, a little boy scratched at his crotch, smiling the sickened way a dog smiles when about to vomit, and whined to his father about wanting a hot dog. In my imaginary exhibit, he’d signify our instinctive side, still umbilically connected to Smilodectes and his rapacious appetite for munching tender leaves. But in the opposite corner , by the armadillo-like glyptodons, a young woman peered down her nose through glasses and earnestly jotted in a notebook; she’d represent our desire to order the natural world meticulously, represented on a grand scale by the myriad labels dotting each diorama that loomed above her curly brown hair. Then the whole museum morphed into an exhibit not of natural history, but of the unnatural history of how we humans reinvent the natural. The whole museum morphed into an exhibit not of natural history, but of the unnatural history of...