2013 & 2014 | San Diego Natural History Museum
I am partial to the Balboa Park Museums in San Diego. They are tightly clustered and remarkably different in their curatorial attitudes and display schemes. There is something going on every time I go in.
This one was taken in the Natural History Museum, which is in no way musty or conservative, though it was founded in 1874 and has been been in the same spot since 1933.
In our old days in the 1980’s, my kids prowled through here. One day, we encountered a display of the research and conclusions on plate tectonics. In the mid-1960’s, our tough earth science courses at UCSD were laying out the “continental drift theory” for us, and just down the hill at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, research vessels were still bringing home revealing data on mid-ocean ridges and seafloor spreading. Barely twenty years later (not even a generation), the geological picture had become irrefutable, and in this museum, my kindergarten-son knowingly watched an animated video of how Pangaea recently became our present catalogue of continents.
The first picture here, like many, may not be about anything in particular, but I always try to notice when a mountain lion is in the room. After all, it’s their territory.
* Run your mouse over the picture to exchange the two pictures.
** Touch-screen users can just touch the picture to swap, then touch the white border to revert.
The American lion in the second picture, though extinct for 10,000 years, still bears watching – in that time, besides other humans, the big cats were our top predatory threats. I wonder if that has anything to do with our own habit of keeping miniature versions of them as house-pets these days.