Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

to stand in that dark hall, listening to African drummers, while Akeley's dearest friends delivered heartfelt tributes to him. Then I remembered how the museum had decided to name the hall after Akeley instead of Theodore Roosevelt.

Small praised Matthews and Rhymer for their tremendous effort, then Behring—truly moved by the occasion—walked up onstage and addressed the crowd. Finally, we were all summoned to "meet our relatives" in the new hall, which bore only one name: Kenneth E. Behring.

It was sleek and modern, with bright lights and lots of glass: a Prada store filled with animals. The first thing I saw was a wall of framed animal photos meant to evoke my own family photos. I tried to smile, but I found the display somewhat patronizing, even for a kid. (I have a seven-year-old, and she knows that humans are mammals.) At the press conference the next morning, associate director Robert Sullivan told a group of reporters, "Once you free yourself from nineteenth-century-type displays, you can create odd juxtapositions." I thought he meant that figuratively, but the walrus was frightfully near the pink fairy armadillo, and the dolphin hung directly above the argali sheep. "Putting these guys on marble really elevates their status. We did that to treat them like sculpture," he said. And indeed, the European mole stood alone on a marble column.

A leopard crouched high in an artificial tree. I followed it into the Africa zone, the hall's centerpiece. It was organized around an abstract water hole that resembled a gigantic Corian sink. I spotted the dramatic tableau of two lions attacking a Cape buffalo. Then the sky darkened and thunder crashed and lighting struck (the "ooh factor"), and I wasn't sure whether I should run or grab an umbrella. The audiovisual thunderstorm went off every ten minutes (an amplification more than an evocation); I stayed for only one storm. Television screens embedded in the floor like rocks in a stream flashed images of leaves and water: dry season, wet season; dry season, wet season; dry season, wet season.

Blinding spotlights illuminated an abstract savanna. Xenon flashers flashed. Digitized animals crowed and growled and rustled for acorns. All 210 years of evolution (and its Discovery Zones) crescendoed to one cataclysmic big bang. The hall was very alive—so alive with the marvels of man that the animals seemed incongruous. "This hall is really about us," Sullivan said at the press conference. Although he meant mammals, the exhibits said otherwise.

A tunnel into which I could burrow tempted me, but not in an evening gown, so I skipped it. I skirted the hominoid footprints (high heels—clearly not a problem 1.5 million years ago). The human presence was so intense that I missed the tableau of a bat nibbling the toes of a research scientist (the "gross-out factor"). Instead, I trekked through an abstract rain forest and a refrigerated tundra (crackling ice, howling wind), until, finally, I found the taxidermists chatting with their wives near the primate case.

John Matthews had delivered all 274 mounts in time and under budget. Now he stood in the finished hall beaming, dressed in a tuxedo, his handlebar mustache waxed and groomed for the big event. Walker, wearing a black suit, had flown down from Alberta. He had run into Dr. Ruth, the sex therapist, at a preopening party and spent the night mimicking her: "You must remember to take off your pants. Hee, hee, hee!" Neither Small nor Behring had thanked Walker onstage, but he took it in stride. "I won't be acknowledged, but I'm glad to be here," he said.

"Hey, the orangutan!" I shouted, catching it out of the corner of my eye. The last time I had seen it, it had been a frozen skin in a cardboard box. Now it was combed out and glossy, clutching stainless steel poles in a stark glass case without a habitat. You'd think it had been shot in Borneo, except for its queer grin, which ever so subtly suggested the taxidermists who had mounted it. "That's the love child of John and Paul," Walker said, laughing.

I congratulated the taxidermists, who were filled with pride; took another peek at the Roosevelt rhino, the Tasmanian wolf, and the koala hugging a Lucite "tree"; and made my way out to the rotunda. The last thing I remember seeing was a hibernating metal squirrel.

After the opening, Paul Rhymer returned to the National Museum of Natural History's exhibitions department, where he works as a modelmaker, taxidermist, and bracket maker (someone who articulates skeletons). John Matthews was dispatched to Newington to dismantle the taxidermy lab that he had set up three years ago. The job involved figuring out what to do with the unused specimens. Some were in good shape; others were mangy and faded. At the onset, Linda Gordon had been told that the "keepers" would be moved to the MSC for storage, but that was no longer an option, so she and John had to decide what to do with the mongrel lot.

This was a shocking turn of events. Contrast the British Natural History Museum, which by law must preserve its specimens. In World War II, during the Blitz, the museum hauled thirty truckloads of stuffed animals (including its precious type specimens) to its annex at Tring for safekeeping. Likewise, in 1994, when the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris built its phenomenal Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, it dug a three-story underground storage facility, the zootheque, to house the unused specimens, some of which were part of the Cabinet du Roi in the 1740s.

Here's what the Smithsonian did. First, it distributed the Behring and Martin specimens, which it had only recently acquired, to schools and nature centers. It saved several historic mounts, including a single Hornaday bison. And the rest, some preserved by Hornaday, Robert Rockwell, and other taxidermy pioneers, were hauled back to the National Museum of Natural History and, under a hazmat tent, broken down into scraps. "We saved a sample of the skin, skull, or skeletal elements