the evolving museum

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1997 6: 185Public Understanding of ScienceJim Endersby

The evolving museum

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Public Understand. Sci.6 (1997) 185–206. Printed in the UK PII: S0963-6625(97)81440-3

The evolving museum

Jim Endersby

This paper examines a recent exhibition on evolution at the Australian Museum, in Sydney, andcontrasts it with the museum’s earlier exhibitions on the same theme, looking at the images ofscience each presents. The differences between the most recent display and its predecessorscan be broadly grouped under three themes: the use of narrative and chronology to organizethe display; the use of realistic dioramas and reconstructions; and the use of glass cases tokeep the visitors and the science apart. Partly through deliberate decisions and partly throughother pressures—including space, time and financial considerations—the newest exhibition hasresolved some of the problems exemplified by the earlier ones. Nevertheless, other difficultiesremain and the conclusion sketches some possible directions which museum designers mightexplore in the future.

Introduction

Science museums are major sites where the public comes into contact with science and,as such, they play a significant role in shaping popular understanding of science and thusin creating and sustaining the public’s scientific conceptions (and misconceptions). Fornatural history museums, explaining the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution by naturalselection presents several interesting challenges: particularly because the topic combinespopular and easily exhibited material (such as dinosaur fossils) with abstract theoreticalissues that are difficult to illustrate. A museum’s task is further complicated by the fact thatevolution is controversial in two senses: it is the only major scientific theory to which thereis organized political and religious opposition, and there are also complex controversieswithin the scientific community over several aspects of the theory. Presenting controversieswithout confusing the public is a potentially stimulating dilemma for a museum.

Some of the ways in which natural history museums may contribute to the public’sunderstanding of science are explored below through a study of three evolutionaryexhibitions at the Australian Museum in Sydney: the old Fossil Halls;Tracks ThroughTime—the story of human evolution; andMore than Dinosaurs—the evolution of life. Theseexhibitions reveal that a complex collection of influences helps shape a museum exhibition.While a single, brief study is no basis upon which to erect a broad theoretical framework,some tentative suggestions have been ventured in the conclusion, based upon treatingmuseum exhibitions as being analogous to ‘texts’ which are ‘read’ in various ways bytheir diverse audiences. Inevitably, such an approach has its problems and some of theseare also discussed.

0963-6625/97/020185 + 22$19.50c© 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd and The Science Museum 185

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186 J. Endersby

The exhibitions

In April 1995 the Museum openedMore than Dinosaurs, an exhibition whose style andcontent were significantly different from those of the Museum’s previous exhibitions onevolution. A comparison with these earlier exhibitions (particularly the Museum’s oldFossils Halls andTracks Through Time) illustrates both the nature of, and some reasons for,the new approach. In addition to providing a context within whichMore than Dinosaurscan be assessed, these older exhibitions also offer an abbreviated history of museum displaytechnique, which helps to clarify the extent to whichMore than Dinosaursrepresents a breakwith tradition. Finally, the comparison suggests some issues which might be considered bymuseum exhibition designers in the future.

More than Dinosaurswas partially intended as a replacement for the Museum’s oldFossil Halls (which were closed shortly beforeMore than Dinosaursopened). Theplanning of these older Halls began in 1961, and they were opened in 1964.1 They useda chronological scheme to organize their presentation of the history of life, within whicheach major geological period was represented by a glass-fronted cabinet of fossils. Thecabinets were arranged along a single, U-shaped path, so that the visitor walked throughtime, beginning with Pre-Cambrian Ediacaran fauna and ending with the megafauna of thePleistocene.

Each cabinet was supplemented by a diorama, which depicted the fossil organisms asthey might have appeared when alive. Cost and space considerations forced the Museumto use miniature dioramas (each was less than a metre wide), and since the dioramas wereall the same size, the scale of the models had to vary considerably (so that the animals ofthe Cambrian were modelled at close to life-size, but the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic had tobe dramatically reduced in size). Size constraints also meant that each diorama containedapproximately the same number of species, and each tended to focus on those groups oforganisms which first emerged during that period.

Tracks Through Time, a semi-permanent exhibition on human evolution which opened in1988 and is still on display, contrasts with the old Fossil Halls in several ways. Although itretains an overall chronological scheme, it is prefaced by a more comprehensive introductorysection which explains the concept of evolution, the nature of fossils and primate biology,and gives a brief history of hominid fossil discoveries. The physical layout partly reflectsthis more complex content, in that it no longer tries to direct visitors along a singlepath.

Like the old Fossil Halls,Tracks Through Timeemploys glass-fronted cabinets as itsmajor exhibition technique, but considerable efforts have been made to make them moreinteresting and informative than the older cabinets: in addition to fossils and replicas offossils, the cases contain colour photos of excavation sites and palaeontologists at work,and photos of key specimens of which the Museum had no cast. The photos and casts areall linked together with bold and attractive graphics.

As with the earlier halls, the displays of fossils are supplemented by dioramas, bothof contemporary apes and of reconstructed early hominids. But unlike the miniaturedioramas in the Fossil Halls, those inTracks Through Timeare life-size, which addssignificantly to their impact. The central, dramatic Australopithecine diorama (showinga family of Australopithecines attempting to drive away a hungry sabre-toothed lion) hasproved particularly popular with visitors. In order to keep the dioramas clean, and to protectthem from damage, all but one are enclosed in glass.

Few of these traditional natural history museum display techniques are retained inMorethan Dinosaurs. There are still glass-fronted cabinets of fossils and a couple of small




The evolving museum 187

dioramas, but the bulk of the space has been devoted to more contemporary presentationtechniques: most visitors enter through a dramatic ‘walk-through’ experience depictingthe origins of life on Earth using an audio-visual display; the skeletons and animalreconstructions are no longer behind glass and many are designed to be touched by visitors;there are many activities for children; static displays are complemented by videos; andtraditional museum cabinets have been largely replaced by flat graphical panels. Thephysical and dramatic centrepiece of the exhibition consists of two dinosaur skeletons,Stegosaurusand Afrovenator, mounted as if locked in combat, but in a deliberately non-naturalistic setting.

The decision to adopt a new style forMore than Dinosaursarose very early in theplanning of the new exhibition.2 There are several noteworthy aspects to the new style,of which three have particularly interesting implications: there is no longer a single patharound the exhibition (partly because there is no single chronological sequence); there arevery few ‘realistic’ dioramas (and those that exist are small); and the major specimens arenot protected by glass. Some of the factors which lay behind these decisions are discussedbelow, as are some issues which were apparently not considered by the exhibition’s creators.

Chronology and iconography

One of the major innovations inMore than Dinosaurswas to move away from thechronological scheme that had been used to organize previous displays. UnlikeTracksThrough Time, for example,More than Dinosaursdoes not have a single entrance and exit,nor is there a ‘correct’ route for visitors to follow. According to Trish MacDonald, one ofthe main education officers on the exhibition:

The scientists involved—except for one—were very keen to get away from thatchronological display idea, and do [More than Dinosaurs] as an issues-basedexhibition that dealt with ideas about evolution, using the fossils to explain thoseideas; to put forward evidence for those ideas.

One reason for this change in style is that the chronological method of presentation—exemplified by the old Fossil Halls—has been a subject of criticism in recent years, mostnoticeably by Martin Rudwick3 and Stephen Jay Gould.4

Rudwick, in his account of the early history of attempts to reconstruct the fossil recordusing illustrations, makes the point that such pictures were partly intended to bolster whatwere then novel claims about the immensity of geological time. In Rudwick’s view suchpictures can never be free from rhetorical overtones:

It is impossible to create scenes from deep time that embody no tacit message aboutthe natural world; anyone who advises on or designs such scenes therefore doeswell to be aware of their implications.5

The ‘tacit message’ embodied in the early depictions Rudwick discusses was stronglyinfluenced by the iconographic tradition from which the early illustrators drew: thatof depicting Biblical narratives, especially those of the Genesis account of creation.This tradition was the only one available which had tackled the problem of narrating,through pictures, events which no human had observed—the same issue that the geologicalillustrators faced.6 The Biblical tradition may have inadvertently introduced teleology intothe geological narratives, particularly in their concluding scenes, which often depict theemergence of humans in a setting that—perhaps deliberately—recalls the Garden of Eden.7




188 J. Endersby

Another aspect of the scenes discussed by Rudwick is their tendency to offer one singlescene as representing the entire flora and fauna of the Earth over a period of millions ofyears. Such compression inevitably led to distortions (such as packing too many speciesand too much activity into a scene) and occasionally to idealization.8 The issues raised byRudwick have a direct bearing on the presentation of the past in natural history museums.For example, the old Fossil Halls suffered from the precise problem he identifies, of havingto pack too many species into a small diorama.

Gould’s discussion of attempts to illustrate life’s history also focuses on issues oficonography and the ways in which pictorial traditions may, sometimes unconsciously,influence our thinking about the issues depicted. He argues that the conventionalichnographies of evolution tend to conform to one of two standard models, which he callsthe ‘Ladder of Progress’ and the ‘Cone of Increasing Diversity’. The Ladder depicts recentorganisms as the predictable outcome of a single, progressive story—which was certain toresult inHomo sapiens. The Cone is more subtle, but still suggests a progressive directionby depicting evolution as a movement ‘upwards and outwards’, from a few simple organismsin the earliest epochs, to a large number of complex organisms in more recent times. Aswith the Ladder, the Cone places humans at the pinnacle of evolution, an iconography whichGould describes as ‘comforting’, in that it shields us from the recognition of our late arrivaland relative insignificance.9

Gould makes the point that both the Cone and the Ladder tend to emphasize the idea ofprogress by portraying only newly evolved organisms within each period (also a flaw of theMuseum’s old Fossil Halls). The important fact that major groups of organisms—such asbacteria—persist, often in substantially the same form for millions of years, is obscured bythe decision to show only the newcomers. Gould also emphasizes a tendency to concentrateon developments within the lineage that eventually led to humans. As a result, majorevolutionary developments within certain groups, such as fishes, are ignored because thefocus of interest has moved to ‘more advanced’ groups, such as reptiles and mammals.10

Gould believes that these misleading ichnographies are not just inaccurate, but are part of aprocess he calls ‘spin-doctoring Darwin’; an attempt to protect ourselves from the humblingreality of our place within the living world.11

The desire to offer a ‘comforting’ picture of evolution need not be a deliberate strategyon the part of the illustrator; Gould is interested in the potential role of the unconsciousconstraints that an iconographic tradition might place on our thinking.12 The role that suchconstraints might play will be discussed further below, but for the moment it is worth notingthat, regardless of the intentions of their designers, the old Fossil Halls at the AustralianMuseum embodied both the flaws Gould finds with traditional iconography. The Ladder ofProgress is emphasized by the single linear direction of the exhibition; and, in depicting eachperiod, the exhibition’s designers showed only the novel groups of organisms, suggestinga single line of development. The implied narrative model was further emphasized by theuse of traditional titles such as ‘The Age of Reptiles’ or ‘The Age of Mammals’ for majorgeological epochs.

Since the Fossil Halls used the same-sized diorama for each geological period it wouldseem that Gould’s Cone of Increasing Diversity was not part of the exhibition’s structure.However, at the entrance to the old Halls was an introductory section which included aconventional depiction of the major evolutionary groups, showing the tree of life as beingvery narrow at the base (only a few, primitive organisms) and then broadening throughtime, to show a wider variety of more complex species. Thus the exhibition managed tocombine the Ladder with the ‘upward and outward’ iconography of the Cone model.





Tracks Through Timeretains the basically chronological structure of the Fossil Halls.However, this structure is supplemented by the introductory sequence described above, andthe exhibition treats African and Asian fossils in two distinct but parallel sequences—anapproach which tends to de-emphasize the chronological focus, as does the fact that theexhibition is only concerned with the relatively brief history of human evolution. Theresult of these various factors is that the iconographic concerns described by Gould areless in evidence. Nevertheless, the dominant model is still a narrative one. Alex Ritchie,the Australian Museum’s senior palaeontologist until his retirement in 1995, had primaryresponsibility for the content ofTracks Through Time, and he describes his feelings whileexamining the empty gallery before he started work on the exhibition:

[I thought] I’ve got to fill this space with skulls and teeth—nothing but skulls andteeth—and make it interesting to the public. I broke out in a cold sweat. Why didI let myself get landed with this? Then I thought, well the only way to do it is totake each group of skulls and teeth. . .and tell stories. And try and tell a differentstory so that people aren’t aware that they’re looking at the same sort of things.13

However, despite the narrative and chronological focus, the result is less strictly linear thanthe old Fossil Halls, and in Ritchie’s view:

That’s good. The first bit is introductory—skeletons, how fossils are formed—butthen the rest of it is fairly sequential. That’s how I would have liked to have re-donethe fossil gallery—I would have kept the flow through time, which I’m sorry we’velost.

Ritchie is the one member of theMore than Dinosaursteam, referred to by MacDonald(above), who wanted to retain the old chronological scheme. The only obvious concessionto his view in the new display is the ‘Time Track’, a walkway which takes visitors fromthe main floor of the gallery up to the mezzanine level. It has the geological time-scalemarked on it, and along the upper part is a simulated rock wall with fossils embedded init. However, the Time Track was introduced mainly for pragmatic reasons: it was essentialto have a ramp for the use of visitors with disabilities, and for the convenience of elderlyvisitors or those with young children. The angle of the ramp, which was fixed by buildingregulations, in turn determined its length. When the exhibition team realized how long theramp would have to be, they decided to make the best use of it they could by developingthe Time Track idea.14 Yet despite his innovative solution, Ritchie remains unhappy withthe lack of a chronological sequence:

I think it’s a bad mistake in the new gallery. Apart from the walkway. . . you don’tget the idea. . .of the changes in life. . .we’ve lost that. You could have kept thatflow, but instead of having the Cambrian followed by the Ordovician followed by[the other geological periods]. . . you could have had thematic displays showing thelife of that period, showing how the fossils of that period were formed, the evidencefor the continents, land and sea. . . show the same fossils and tell stories.

Other scientists on the team do not share Ritchie’s view. Greg Edgecombe, who hasnow replaced Ritchie as senior palaeontologist, has doubts about the effectiveness of thetraditional approach:

What I wondered was, do people really get the message from that approach? Whenpeople look at the Ordovician diorama and say, ‘Oh, this happened in the Ordovician,and here’s Australia in the Ordovician. And, oh look at this, sea levels were highin the Ordovician: it was mostly pretty warm and cephalopods expanded’, and




190 J. Endersby

so on. And then a metre later you’re in the Silurian—and ‘here’s Australia inthe Silurian. . ..’ Are people seeing the differences? What was the key differencebetween the Ordovician and the Silurian? I don’t know if people get those messages.They are getting their nice little time-travel trip, but we felt that had been done—there was nothing more we could do with it. . . so we eliminated it.15

Edgecombe is also well aware of Gould’s critique, and he and Winston Ponder, amalacologist on the Australian Museum’s staff, developed the exhibition’s Tree of Lifediagram—which depicts evolutionary relationships using a radial design instead of themore conventional linear one—as a conscious alternative to the traditional Ladder andCone iconographies:

[The Tree of Life] has two components. One of them is designed to be systematicinformation: what is the evidence for evolutionary units—for taxa? That’s onelittle game [visitors] play. The other game was designed to be nothing more thana somewhat Steve Gould-ian lesson in the way diversity is distributed, in that kidswould keep pressing ‘frog’ and ‘goat’ and ‘bird’ and the same branch would keeplighting up. And they would realize ‘we’re only dealing with one piece of thetree’. . .. Steve [Gould] liked the Tree of Life—when he came here we took himthrough the exhibition and he was really turned on by the Tree of Life.

A further factor in influencing the move away from conventional chronology was that theMuseum’s Education Department had evidence to suggest that attempts to direct visitorsalong a single path was futile. According to MacDonald:

We found from studies all over the world that people don’t follow through—theypick and choose, it’s like a supermarket mentality. You go around and [choose]whatever takes your fancy. So [More than Dinosaurs] had to be written in such away that [each panel] was a discrete piece of information.

Bodo Matzick, the senior designer forMore than Dinosaurs, agrees that the new design hadto reflect the ‘supermarket mentality’ of visitors and, as a result, ‘there’s not a chronologicalorder at all, you can browse around, it’s not linked in any way’.

Real and hyper-real

The lack of a chronological scheme inMore than Dinosaursmay partly explain thedramatically reduced number of dioramas in the new gallery, since one obvious way ofimplementing a chronological structure is with a sequence of dioramas (as in the old FossilHalls). Tracks Through Timehad more dioramas thanMore than Dinosaurs, but they hadalready been given a different emphasis from those in the old Fossil Halls. TheTracksThrough Timedioramas, which were produced by former members of the Museum’s staffunder Ritchie’s direct supervision, illustrate Ritchie’s commitment to narrative—they aremuch more dramatic than the older collections of models.

However, although Ritchie directed the construction of the dioramas, pressure of timemeant that he lost control over their final appearance in two cases. Ritchie remains unhappywith the male figure in the Neanderthal burial diorama, which was produced by the formerhead of exhibitions at the Museum, who:

. . .did the [Neanderthal] man with this stooped, round-shouldered pose of thetraditional Neanderthal figure—with a big gap between the big toe and the othertoes. [The pose] was based on out-of-date information. The woman was OK, but





this [male] figure—I wouldn’t have had that. We got away with it because he’s inthe cave, but it’s perpetuating the old story of the stooped, shambling Neanderthals.

Arguments about reconstructing Neanderthals have been going on since the first skeleton wasdiscovered. While these controversies between palaeontologists have ostensibly concernedthe physiognomy and anatomy of the extinct species, their real focus has been the issue ofthe evolutionary relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans.16 If Neanderthalsare reconstructed as closely resembling modernHomo sapiens, the depiction emphasizesour closeness to them. Impassioned arguments over how recently we shared a commonancestor with apes broke out as soon as Darwin published theOrigin of Species(1859) andintensified when he followed up with theDescent of Man(1871). In 1927 William KingGregory diagnosed some of his contemporaries as suffering from ‘”pithecophobia” or thedread of apes’—a desire to maximize the evolutionary distance between apes and humans.17

Similar patterns of debate reappear in more recent controversies over hominid fossils.Given the emotive nature of debates over reconstructing our fossil ancestors, there

might be more to Ritchie’s remark than concern over up-to-date research. This possibilityis highlighted by his comments on the Australopithecine diorama. The figures in this lattergroup were closely modelled on casts of fossil skeletons, but once again—due to what hedescribes as ‘timetable and pressure’—Ritchie lost some control when the finished modelswere sent out to have hair applied to them. When they came back:

They were the hairiest looking chimps I’d ever seen in my life—I set to with acomb and brush and plucked them, and got about half of it off. I would have takena lot more off if I’d had the time.

Ritchie’s slightly tongue-in-cheek description of the models as looking like ‘chimps’ raisesseveral issues connected with the issue of ‘realism’ in dioramas which depict extinctorganisms. It is usually impossible to be certain about important aspects of the appearanceof such organisms; the textures of skin, hair or scales are very rarely preserved, and thecolours never are. However, before a diorama can be constructed some assumptions mustbe made about such ephemeral traces. While most scientists accept that palaeontology (likeall scientific knowledge) is a combination of evidence, inference and educated guesswork,it is important to remember Rudwick’s point that illustrations are rhetorical devices withinthe context of an argument—the more convincing the illustrations, the more force they addto the argument: as he puts it, ‘their realistic style invites us to imagine we are seeing thedeep past with our own eyes, unproblematically’.18

Ritchie’s remark implies that the Australopithecine models were too ape-like, and sincethis conclusion cannot be based on direct physical evidence, it must have been inferredby reference to related, living species. Given that Australopithecines’ brain size and styleof locomotion appear to have been somewhere between those of humans and apes, it isreasonable to assume that they would have had more body hair thanH. sapiens, but not asmuch as apes.

Nevertheless, given the lack of direct evidence, a scientist’s judgment about howhairy their reconstruction should be is inevitably more subjective than a decision aboutthe creature’s height or posture. It is important however, not to fall into the ‘fact/value’hypothesis by pretending that there are ‘value-free’ facts simply floating in the world,which are only tainted by subjective values when they become anchored to a hypothesis.19

Obviously every decision about a reconstruction (like every scientific judgement) is partlysubjective. Nevertheless, one might reasonably expect that the more secure inferences (likethe physical dimensions of the species) would be depicted in a style that in some waydistinguishes them from the more speculative guesswork needed to complete the diorama




192 J. Endersby

(like the amount of hair), not least because these assumptions substantially change thedisplay’s message: 3 million-year-old ancestors who look like apes imply that we havebecome human only recently—hairless, upright Australopithecines distance us from ouranimal origins.

Another obvious reason for museums to tackle reconstructions with caution is thatmuseum displays have sometimes been used for overtly political ends. An example isprovided by the displays of fossil humans which were mounted at the American Museumof Natural History (AMNH) in New York during the 1920s. Henry Fairfield Osborn, theMuseum’s director, commissioned Charles R. Knight to paint murals which reconstructedthe life-styles of various fossil hominids. Osborn’s detailed brief ensured that the muralsillustrated his theories about the great evolutionary distance between the various humanraces and the superiority of white, northern Europeans over other groups. The murals werecompleted in time for the Second International Eugenics Conference, held at the AMNH in1921.20

Ritchie himself gave an example of political bias in museum displays, when discussinga display at the Victorian Museum in Melbourne. During a debate over ‘scientificcreationism’, a television crew visited the museum to look for evidence that the museumwas propagandizing on behalf of evolution, but they left:

. . .because they couldn’t find anything. . .what they missed was. . .a big glasscase. . .with stuffed gorillas and chimps and orangs. The seams are bursting andthere’s straw coming out. . . they missed the fact that the display was put there bySir Frederick McCoy in the 1860s or 1870s, because he didn’t agree with Darwin.He commissioned [it] to show that we couldn’t possibly be evolved from somethinglike that.

In this display (which is still on view at the Museum), the taxidermist had deliberatelyemphasized the ‘bestial’ features of the apes in order to illustrate the anti-Darwinianargument, and although the introduction of deliberate bias is rare in modern museums,more subtle arguments are nevertheless being made and supported whenever displays arecreated. As previously mentioned, the rhetorical impact of a museum display need notbe the result of any conscious intent on the part of its designers: a prevailing style ortradition may be adhered to for commercial or other reasons, without much considerationbeing given to its significance. For example, the trend towards displaying dinosaurs inactive, aggressive postures—usually in combat with one another (such as the centrepieceof More than Dinosaurs)—which is so popular with the public, was founded by Osbornat the AMNH as a way of ‘glorifying the struggle for existence’.21 As with the earlierexample of hominid displays, Osborn had a political point to make about the inevitabilityand desirability of struggle within and between human societies, a point which, it could beargued, is being unwittingly supported by museums that adopt this display style because ofits popularity.

However, in addition to their rhetorical impact within a specific debate, realistic dioramasalso contain implications about the nature of scientific knowledge and the degree of certaintywhich scientists attach to their theories. Some of these issues are illustrated by an article inthe popular US magazineNatural History, which describes a new hominid diorama designedby John Holmes for the AMNH.22 The diorama depicts a male and femaleHomo ergasterin a way which is extremely convincing—as the photos accompanying the article show.According to Richard Milner, the article’s author, Holmes has a passion for ‘producingre-creations of early hominids so lifelike they seem almost to breathe and blink’.23 WillardWhitson, one of AMNH’s exhibition designers says of Holmes’ work:





How he does it I don’t know, for the life of me. There’s something about the sparkof the eye, the curl of the lip. He’s like the great sculptor taxidermist, Carl Akeley,who created our Hall of African Mammals seventy years ago. Other mountedanimals are accurate, but they don’t have the animation that Akeley brought to hissubjects, that sense of truthfulness.23

Yet, however skilful Holmes may be, he is unlike Akeley in one important aspect:Akeley was mounting the skins of living species, whileH. ergaster has been extinctfor millions of years. The ‘sense of truthfulness’ common to both men’s work musttherefore be significantly different: Akeley’s animals are realistic while Holmes’ are in asense convincing forgeries, intended (quite literally) to flesh out an argument about humanevolution.24

Ian Tattersall, curator of physical anthropology at AMNH, says of Holmes’ earlier workon a diorama of Australopithecines:

What Holmes did with the Australopithecines did not simply reflect that these wereprimitive hominids with striking similarities to apes in their skulls and heads; hebrought them to life by making them look vulnerable, slightly worried. . . . Theyhave this rather apprehensive look on their faces, and they’re looking in differentdirections; clearly they’re not very happy out there in this almost vegetation-freeenvironment.25

As discussed above, the process of ‘bringing to life’ the Australopithecines entails a complexprocess of interpretation, within which different aspects of the reconstruction involvedifferent degrees of certainty. For example, although the physical dimensions of the figuresare based directly on fossils, no fossil skeleton is ever found intact and the various bonesare always disarticulated, so some degree of interpretation is involved in ascertaining basicphysical information (and the issue of hair and skin colour has already been discussed). Thecreatures are shown in an ‘almost vegetation-free environment’; this may be plausible butmust be largely based on negative evidence—the absence of fossil plants or pollen—andthis could be the result of imperfections of the fossil record, so a slightly higher degree ofinterpretation is inevitably involved. And the final factor (which is especially important inmaking the figures ‘life-like’) is the ‘rather apprehensive look on their faces’—this impliesan intelligent ability to deduce danger from the absence of vegetation, an assumption forwhich there is no physical evidence at all.

Some limitations of natural history museum display techniques are highlighted bya comparison between those used in museums which display human cultural artefacts.The latter often need to display objects, such as fragments of pottery, which requiremodern materials to be added in order to reconstruct the object’s original appearance. Theconvention observed in most of these institutions is that any contemporary materials addedare given a deliberately contrasting colour, so that there is no confusion over which sectionsare original. No such convention is observed in natural history museums, and despite thefact that the various components of a diorama are supported by very different degrees ofevidence they are all depicted using a uniformly realistic style. This homogeneous visuallanguage seems to imply that the scientists are equally confident about all aspects of theirreconstruction. It also glosses over the reality that all the objects in natural history museumsare human artefacts—culture not nature. Stuffed animals, prepared skeletons and dioramasare as much the product of human skills as Etruscan pottery, yet the ‘naturalism’ of thediorama suggests we are seeing nature not culture, experiencing the animals directly withoutthe mediation of human artifice.




194 J. Endersby

Umberto Eco remarks on the almost excessively ‘realistic’ appearance of some dioramasin American museums, and comments that:

To speak of things one wishes to connote as real, these things must seem real. The‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake’. Absolute unrealityis offered as a real presence.26

Eco’s comment is specifically about the reconstruction of recent political history, but hisinsight can be applied to natural history as well. Eco calls this style ‘hyper-reality’ and itseems an apt term for hominids which ‘seem almost to breathe and blink’ (or for Akeley’sstuffed animals24). In a museum context, the hyper-real becomes a powerful rhetoricaldevice, a decisive statement in an argument which has often not been explicitly stated.

The uniform ‘realism’ of the reconstructions may imply to the public that the scientistsare claiming a higher degree of certainty than is intended. Scientists cannot possibly ‘know’(in the sense that the public generally understands the term) what Australopithecines felt,nor what they worried about. At what point does the desire to make science accessiblebecome open to misinterpretation as an overweening scientific omniscience? Tattersallseems oblivious to this question when he comments:

The vivacity of these early hominids is important in a museum where we have somany first-class animal dioramas with real specimens, but in this case there areno actual hides, antlers, or hoofs to help the illusion. The trick is to make thesefabricated creatures—built of fragmentary data, educated guesses, and imagination—look real.27

The language of both this and his previous quotation is remarkable: Tattersall refers to thediorama as a ‘trick’ or an ‘illusion’, and adds that the hominids are ‘fabricated creatures—built of fragmentary data, educated guesses, and imagination’. Yet he is pleased that theyhave been ‘brought. . . to life’ so that ultimately they ‘look real’. Tattersall’s languageseems to reveals a substantial gap between what scientists call knowledge and what theythink the public are capable of understanding. One reason why Tattersall may feel willing(or even obliged) to ‘trick’ the public is revealed by the implication (in the second quote)that the hominid dioramas have to compete for the public’s attention with the Museum’s‘first-class animal dioramas with real specimens’.

Reliable knowledge

The issue of what the public can be expected to understand, and how to depict scientificknowledge so that it will be understood, arises in Gilbert and Mulkay’s discussion ofscientific illustrations.28 Their work concerned a scientific argument about bio-energetics,the details of which are not relevant in this context, but during the course of their researchthey questioned the scientists involved in the controversy about the differences betweenillustrations in technical scientific papers and those in popular presentations and textbooks.Most of the scientists referred to the pictures in technical papers as ‘fictions’, usefulsummaries of a particular point of view, but always provisional, tentative and subject torevision.29 The highly abstract, schematic nature of these diagrams was felt to appropriatelyreflect their symbolic purposes. As one of the scientists commented:

These things are not really for posterity. . .. They’re the best guess that we have atthe time or they’re for purposes of simply making things clearer even if it’s wrong.30





Yet despite the scientist’s clear appreciation of the fictional nature of their pictures, they allfelt that articles aimed at a non-specialist audience needed a different type of illustration,because a lay audience will not understand the schematic conventions of the specialists’diagrams. The scientists agreed that a general audience only needs a ‘general impression’of the science, not the complete story, and that in this context, inaccurate details areunimportant, since a lay reader will not remember the details anyway. In general thescientists interviewed felt that illustrations for a non-specialist public had to be more‘realistic’ since such an audience will not understand abstraction.31

Curiously, the scientists generally recognized the danger that realistic pictures couldbe interpreted too literally, and several stressed that they would not show such picturesto their students, or would warn the students not to be too literal in their interpretation.32

Others remarked that illustrations, unlike words or equations, were more likely to be ‘takenas gospel’.33 The scientists were clearly aware of a tension between the desire to makepictures accessible to non-specialists (by reducing their abstraction) and the danger of suchpictures being misinterpreted. Gilbert and Mulkay have christened this tension ‘Trubshaw’sDilemma’ (after their pseudonym for one of the scientists involved). Trubshaw’s Dilemmaresults from precisely the issue raised above in discussing Holmes’ hominid dioramas: theuse of a single, realistic visual language to describe two different things: broadly acceptedscientific facts (albeit of varying reliability) and much more speculative hypotheses.34

When applied to a museum context, Trubshaw’s Dilemma relates to the wider issue ofhow the public perceive museum displays. In describing her research into visitor perceptionsof science museums, Sharon MacDonald highlights the fact that museum visitors may notsee what the curators and designers intend them to:

Visitors. . .frame and interpret the visit in ways not expected or planned by theexhibition’s creators. In particular, they connect together exhibitions not intendedto be linked, they read the exhibition as being prescriptive where it was not intendedto be, and they mostly fail to describe the exhibition in terms of the ‘science andtechnology’ which feature in the makers’ principal stated exhibition aim.35

The extent to which museums are best viewed as a ‘text’ which is read (or misread) by itsvisitors will be considered below, but MacDonald goes on to comment that:

In the context of the exhibition. . . , visitors seem to treat science as a matter ofobjective fact, aslegitimate and trustworthyknowledge. (emphasis added)35

Given that audiences may misinterpret the intended message—and then put great faith intheir misinterpretation as being ‘knowledge’, museums need to be particularly careful notto exaggerate the confidence scientists have in their theories. Museums may be promotingthe old stereotype of the all-knowing scientist if they unintentionally imply that scientistsknow things (such as ‘what Australopithecines thought’) which they cannot possibly know.

The possibility of the public misinterpretingTracks Through Timewas recognized asa potential problem by Alex Ritchie when the exhibition was being planned. At severalpoints, he had to resist pressure to simplify the hominid story being told by picking whathe calls ‘the most likely’ hypothesis from those on offer, because:

We don’t know. It’s far safer to say ‘this is how science works’. These are thevarious ways of interpreting this stuff.

Several debates in human evolution are deliberately left open-ended in the exhibition. Forexample, in discussing the question ‘How many kinds of hominids lived at one time?’, theexplanatory text concludes there is insufficient evidence to draw a definite conclusion.




196 J. Endersby

Similarly a discussion of tools uncovered close to fossils ofAustralopithecus robustusconcludes by saying ‘we do not know if they made or used them’.36 However, it is likelythat only the more careful readers would pick this up, particularly since there is a lot of textin the exhibition. A more casual viewer, particularly one who ‘reads’ the dioramas ratherthan the text, may miss these important points, but Ritchie is not too concerned:

They’re not all that interested anyway. . . if they walk away with the overall idea ofevolution through time and that humans have come from a common ancestor withapes—that’s probably all that [I would expect] they would get.

Given the long history of arguments over fossil reconstructions, and the relatively highlevel of current interest in the topic, it is perhaps surprising that concerns about realismand the possibility of misinterpretation were not apparently a major factor in the decisionto omit dioramas fromMore than Dinosaurs. According to MacDonald, their omission wasprimarily a design decision: ‘the designers on the team were very keen to have it look totallydifferent to the old exhibition’. In particular, she feels that Matzick, the senior designer, is:

. . . very anti-dioramas—he thinks they’re old-fashioned. We wanted to have thefighting Stegosaurus and Afrovenator in a natural setting. . .no we couldn’t havethat—it had to be stylized. He was just very anti-diorama.

Ritchie is also unhappy with the mount of these two skeletons, and the lack of dioramasgenerally. He attributes the latter to ‘fashion’ and comments that ‘in this institution, theexhibitions people will always be listened to over the scientists’. Edgecombe, however, ismore supportive of Matzick’s approach:

I would generally let Bodo go where he was going. . . . It wasn’t really my job tointerfere, unless I thought what he was doing wasn’t really getting the ideas across.I like breaks from the past, it’s a bit more challenging. On the other hand I lovedioramas. . .but maybe that’s because in some ways they’re comforting, they’re old.

Matzick himself denies being anti-dioramas as such, but he has a number of reservationsabout their use. He recalls that the two which did get included inMore than DinosaurscostA$15 000 (approximately£7000) each and were only included because the scientists:

. . . insisted on those dioramas—I wouldn’t have spent the money on them, but ourscientists have a budget for acquisitions—they buy beautiful fossils and they lovedthe dioramas. So I said ‘OK, we can have two, but we can’t have any more—wehave to spend money on other things’.37

Matzick was also concerned that the miniature dioramas in the old Fossil Halls wereimpossible to clean—which exacerbated the old-fashioned ‘dusty museum’ atmosphere ofthe Fossil Halls. Practical considerations were also behind the decision to avoid solid woodand glass cases, which are expensive to move or update. However, Matzick does not regardthe idea that realistic dioramas might be misleading as important:

I think it’s a bit over the top. . . there are people who still like those things, so youshould have a bit of it in there. I think you should have a bit of everything, even ifit’s one diorama. . . that’s my philosophy: you should have something for everyone,so that everyone gets something out of it. If you don’t want to read any text, you’vegot lots of other things to look at and touch and play with. But if you want to readtext there is still enough.





‘Evolution is a fact’

The implications of realistic dioramas are not the only problems for a museum trying toaccurately present the nature of scientific knowledge. Another dilemma arises from thedifferences between scientific and everyday language, a good example of which is theintroductory section ofTracks Through Time, which contains the unambiguous statementthat ‘evolution is a fact’ (the same phrase recurs on the mezzanine level ofMore thanDinosaurs). In conventional scientific usage, evolution would be better described as atheory than a fact, but the word ‘theory’ might lead museum visitors to assume it is notscientifically accepted. Exhibition designers can therefore find themselves in a dilemma,which arises from trying to avoid confusion while trying not to exaggerate the certainty ofscientific knowledge.

Ritchie comments that the words ‘evolution is a fact’, inTracks Through Time, represent:

. . .a compromise—I was cut back on words. If I’d been left my freedom I wouldhave said ‘Evolution is a fact. Evolution is also a theory. Most scientists acceptthat evolution has happened, but scientists have differing ideas about how it hashappened.’ That would have covered the objections of, say, the creationists. Thatstatement at the front, which catches you in the eye, is the product of [being told],‘You’ve got four words, that’s all you’re going to get’.I did push for the other version, but I don’t think it matters really. . . . Rememberthat in this museum. . .there’s virtually nothing else on evolution. Now we have anew gallery [but] we don’t push evolution much.

Ritchie’s assertion that the Museum does not ‘push evolution’ is an interesting one. Mostscientists would probably agree that the concept of evolution is a central one for a museumlargely dedicated to the life sciences, but Ritchie implies that evolution is a ‘position’ thatneeds to be ‘pushed’. Ritchie is a long-standing opponent of creationism,38 and his referenceto creationism in this quote reinforces the interpretation that ‘evolution is a fact’ is, in partat least, a political statement. Edgecombe is even more forthright than Ritchie in identifyingit as a political statement:

That’s our political agenda. . .it’s what we perceive to be our responsibility. We’vegot to deal with these people [creationists] and if the public is not getting theinformation elsewhere, then dammit, we’ll give it to them.

This blurring of political and scientific statements (which might surprise some museumvisitors) arises partly out of differences between scientific and everyday language. In popularspeech, ‘fact’ and ‘theory’ tend to be viewed as a pair of contrasting opposites (hence therhetorical force of Ritchie’s proposed alternative wording ‘Evolution is a fact. Evolutionis also a theory.’), but to a scientist they are almost indistinguishable when applied to awell-established idea like evolution.

However, while it could be argued that ‘evolution is a fact’ is an accurate summary,in everyday speech, of the scientific consensus, is it inadvertently misrepresenting science?Both Ritchie and Edgecombe believe that much of the power of science arises from itsability to revise and correct itself. Does communicating this important point undermine thecredibility of statements such as ‘evolution is a fact’? Edgecombe doesn’t think so:

If it weren’t correctible, it wouldn’t be science. I don’t view it as a conflict, I view itas complementary. The fact that more evidence can render a hypothesis less viableis the essence of science.




198 J. Endersby

MacDonald agrees that there is no conflict between these two aims, ‘I think it’s veryimportant we say, that from our point of view, evolution is a fact’. However, she sees anemphasis on the process of science—and the way it reaches and revises conclusions—asin some senses counterbalancing statements such as ‘evolution is a fact’. She cites as anexample the display on the Cambrian genusAnomalocaris(in More than Dinosaurs), acreature which was totally misidentified when first discovered in Canada’s Burgess Shaledeposits. The separate parts of what is now known to be a single organism were originallydescribed as three distinct creatures.39 The Museum’s display describes the mistake and itssubsequent correction as an example of how science actually works, and the text is carefulto stress the nature of the scientific process:

[Fossils] provide clues about basic body shape and specialized body parts. Scientiststhen makeeducated guessesabout the animal’s colour by looking at the colour ofliving relatives or unrelated animals with similar lifestyles. Reconstructions arelikely to become outdatedwith new information. (emphasis added)40

Yet, while this point is clearly made in the text, the earlier comments about visitors ignoringthe words and ‘reading’ the objects still apply, and it is also possible that visitors who doread the text will perceive a contradiction between the open-ended nature of scientific inquiryand the apparent certainty of ‘evolution is a fact’.41

Glass barriers to knowledge

While the slightly greater emphasis on the uncertainty of scientific knowledge is an aspect ofMore than Dinosaursthat many visitors will probably not notice, they will almost certainlybe struck by the fact that—unlikeTracks Through Time—most of the specimens inMorethan Dinosaursare not enclosed in glass cases. And in addition to the use of free-standingmounts on open platforms, many of the objects in the new gallery are explicitly designed tobe touched by visitors. This display style is in marked contrast to the ‘hands-off’ approachof the traditional museum. Edgecombe comments that:

One of the boldest things we did [inMore than Dinosaurs]—and it’s mostly Bodo[Matzick’s], dare I say,vision—was putting so many of the skeletons out withoutperspex in front of them. We had the fear that ‘my god, are they going to rip thebones off?’—but so far they haven’t. . . . Maybe people are perceiving that they’rebeing trusted, and so they don’t stuff around with things.15

However, other members of the project team place a different emphasis on the lack of glass.MacDonald, for example, sees the lack of glass as having been driven by the designer’sdecision to use flat information panels:

[Matzick’s] rationale when he was putting it to us was that we can change it easily.It does make better use of the space and it was cheaper to produce than full-onshowcases, with everything behind glass. I guess you’ve got that freeing-up of nothaving to have everything behind glass. In that sense it’s quite nice because you’vegot lots of touch specimens and you can get a hand on things.42

The few glass-fronted cabinets in the gallery are incorporated into the flat panels, and tendto be placed near the bottom of the panels. According to MacDonald, this was a deliberatemove to give children something to look at while their parents or teachers were reading thetext on the upper part of the panel.42

The decision to remove the glass from in front of objects was partly made possible bythe fact that the majority of the objects in the exhibition are casts or replicas of fossils, rather





than the originals. As Edgecombe observes, if the gallery had used more of the Museum’scollection of original fossils, the designers would have been forced to protect them morethoroughly.15 However, most of the objects inTracks Through Timeare also replicas (andin both galleries they represent a substantial expenditure), yet in the earlier gallery theyare behind glass and in the later they are not. Whatever the balance of reasons behindthis decision, one effect is that the lack of glass places the visitor in a new relationshipto the objects. In some senses, the glass of a museum case is symbolic of the barrierbetween the scientist and the public: between the expert creators of knowledge and itsnon-expert consumers. It is therefore possible (if a little pretentious) to interpret the glassas an epistemological barrier, in which case its removal may be taken to represent a desireto get the public more closely involved with science.

However, the removal of physical barriers between visitors and objects is only one ofa number of changes intended to make visitors feel more involved in the Museum. In aneffort to escape the unappealing image of traditional museums,More than Dinosaurshasplaced great emphasis on activities for children. Edgecombe observes that Sarah Main, theother main education officer onMore than Dinosaurs, has a specific interest in activities forchildren:

That’s her thing, little kids and kids’ education. So when she was looking at howwe would deal with issues, she would consistently come back to ‘what can we dofor pre-school children’. That accounts for the ‘Fossils and Dinosaurs’ area—thewoodenStegosaurusmodel and whatnot—that whole wall being a kids’ area. Andthe children’s area under the ramp [the Sea Caves] was her baby.

He describes the scientists’ attitude to Main’s focus as:

‘OK, let her do her thing there’—it’s almost a concession in that space, ‘that’s great,go do the kid’s stuff [but] no kiddywinkle stuff up on the ‘Flight’ panel.15

On balance, however, Edgecombe feels that the activities for children enhance the exhibitionand create a relaxed atmosphere for visitors. Ritchie is a little less enthusiastic:

I think its been pushed a bit too much, the kiddywinkle bit. I don’t think there’s aneed for the [Fossils and Dinosaurs section]. I like the [Sea] Caves—that’s a gooduse of a useless space. Sarah [Main] went for that and I thought ‘great’, but theother ones in the gallery are distracting and noisy. We have original stuff that couldhave been put there that would have been a better use of that space.13

The scientists’ comments on the activities for children tend to reinforce the suggestionthat the physical barriers between audience and objects are to some extent professional,disciplinary boundaries. Both Ritchie and Edgecombe tend to see the children’s activitiesas a ‘concession’ or ‘distraction’ from the gallery’s central purpose. In contrast tothe scientists, the Museum’s Education Section was more supportive about activities forchildren. In addition to Sarah Main’s enthusiasm, to which both Ritchie and Edgecomberefer, MacDonald identifies communicating with all the Museum’s different audiences asone of her primary concerns:

I take responsibility to ensure that we present information in as many ways as wepossibly can, to cater for different people. So we have kids-style stuff, adult andstudent-style stuff. But within the ‘adult style’ we try to cater to different learningstyles—touch specimens, audio-visuals, interactives, and activities to supplementeach panel where we can.42




200 J. Endersby

Matzick’s comment (above) about aiming to provide ‘something for everyone’ suggests thathe is also supportive of the children’s activities, which implies that there may have beena division within the project team—between education and design on one side, and thescientists on the other. However, the various comments on dioramas suggest a differentalliance—education and science versus design—whereas the observations about the use ofglass cases suggest very little tension between the three groups. The apparent patterns ofshifting alliances within the project team reflect the comments of all interviewees aboutthe way in which the exhibition was planned. Edgecombe also refers to shifting alliancesbetween the four main project scientists:

At times. . .alliances form and there’s a shifting balance of those. There were timeswhen Winston [Ponder] and I would form the ‘evolution axis’ and other times whenAlex [Ritchie], Bob [Jones43] and I would form the palaeontology axis. I wouldn’tsay there were conflicts, but it does shape things.15

While assessing the possible role of personality conflicts in determining the final appearanceof More than Dinosaursis extremely difficult, it does raise the problem of determining thebalance of factors which were finally decisive in producing the exhibition. The three mainareas of difference identified above—chronology, dioramas and glass cases—all relate tothe physical appearance of the exhibition (which is markedly different from that of earliergalleries), but as discussed above all three have ramifications well beyond display anddesign styles. The decision to replace the traditional chronological sequence with a morethematic one has implications for the issue of the iconography of evolution. Similarly, boththe text of the exhibition (and particularly statements like ‘evolution is a fact’) and thevarious illustrations which support it (such as dioramas) are affected by a whole complexof considerations—including education, information, entertainment and politics—but alsoby practical considerations, such as the available time and money.

Conclusion

Given these diverse factors and the competing pressures on the project team, is it possible toanswer the question, ‘why does the new exhibition look so different from its predecessors?’

More than Dinosaurscould be described as an attempt to modernize museumpresentation, to give the exhibition an ill-defined quality called ‘relevance’. More scepticalvisitors, especially those who enjoyed the older-style exhibitions, might regard the newlook as a conscious ‘dumbing down’ of the scientific content, in order to transform theAustralian Museum from a scientific institution into a site of mere entertainment. Boththese explanations (and many others which are possible) focus on the institutional level ofthe Museum: the exhibition is interpreted as a conscious product of the Museum’s policy.Other explanations which are focused on what is sometimes called the structural level wouldinclude economic ones (which might, for example, explain the use of flat graphical panelsas a cost-cutting measure, forced upon the Museum by reduced government funding).

An alternative approach to understanding the changing presentation would be to focuson the individuals who created the exhibition, an explanation in terms of individual agency.Personality clashes, professional rivalries and individual political agendas might all beat work behind the scenes, particularly given the controversial topic. However, suchexplanations are difficult to sustain—museum staff are likely to be on their ‘best behaviour’when being interviewed by an outsider and may have a variety of good reasons for presentingtheir work in specific ways. Since three of those interviewed are still employed by theMuseum, they might also feel it impolitic to comment on institutional issues in an interview.





Despite these caveats, it is worth noting that when the staff were asked directly about therelative importance of institutional and individual influences, they all described personalopinions and preferences as decisive. However, it may be equally significant thatuntil thisquestion was asked directly, all four had repeatedly cited lack of time and money as themain explanation for anything they saw as a shortcoming of the finished gallery.

Obviously, structure and agency explanations need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed itwould be most surprising if these two types of factors did not interact, sometimes reinforcing,sometimes neutralizing each other.44 However, given the difficulty both of ascertainingindividual motives and of accurately determining the Museum’s policies,45 it may be moreproductive to interpret museum exhibitions primarily as examples of scientific rhetoric, byexamining the arguments (tacit and explicit) which the display presents and the nature ofthe rhetorical effects used to support those arguments. Given that the main focus of thisresearch is on how the public understands science, the visual elements within exhibitions areespecially important, which is why many of the examples discussed above have concentratedon these elements.

However, this type of approach has its own difficulties. For example, Gilbert andMulkay’s approach has been criticized by Steven Shapin for being restrictive, in that itfocuses on scientific discourse to the exclusion of all other analyses. He also criticizestheir assumption that textual analysis is somehow more objective than its rivals, and iscontemptuous of the notion that there can be such a thing as ‘value-free’ history.46 The(admittedly limited) use of textual analysis in this paper is not intended to imply that suchan approach is unproblematically objective, much less that it can be used as an exclusivealternative to other types of interpretation. It does, however, have the advantage that ‘texts’(and I include both illustrations, such as dioramas, and interviews under this broad heading)are public statements—other analysts have equal access to them and can make their owninterpretations. The evidence needed to sustain arguments about individual motives (orinstitutional policies) can be much harder to obtain, which can make it difficult to disputean argument which is built on it. Ideally, a comprehensive analysis would draw on allthese approaches (and probably others) to gain a complete picture of the exhibition and itsmeanings; there has not been enough time to do that in this case. It is also clear that, inaddition to the need to relate a textual analysis to complementary approaches, the process ofreading or decoding a text is in itself a complex one, and an extensive literature has grownup around these topics. In future research it might be productive to explore some of thesecontemporary critical strategies to see whether they could be applied to analysing the workof public scientific institutions.

As has been stressed above, the rhetorical messages embodied in a museum displayneed not be conscious ones: uncovering ‘subliminal’ arguments does not imply that themuseum’s curators and designers are engaged in a conspiracy to influence the public in aspecific direction. However, one criticism of this approach might be that if the messagesare lost on the designers and curators, might they not be lost on the public too? In whichcase, do they matter?47 I would argue that they do, for reasons which are mentioned above:the public and the professionals do not read exhibitions in the same way. The commentsabove about the readings of the statement ‘evolution is a fact’ illustrate the differencesbetween scientific and everyday language. A curator or designer steeped in the culture ofa scientific museum might be so well aware of the need to qualify certain categories ofscientific statement that they see no need to make such qualifications explicit, believing that‘everyone knows what we mean by “fact” in this context’. Needless to say, the museumvisitor may well have a different culture and read the statement quite differently. Many ofthe examples given above draw on this distinction between what scientists say and what the




202 J. Endersby

public ‘hears’. The hidden rhetorical messages will strike a different unconscious note fordifferent audiences—this is to some extent unavoidable, but analysing these hidden textsmay help to make intentional messages more explicit while eliminating others, thus reducingthe range of misreadings.

So, with the limitations of textual analysis clearly in mind, what messages does the‘text’ of More than Dinosaurscontain? The issues of iconography (such as those raisedby Rudwick and Gould) are well understood by the Museum’s staff; however, the projectteam chose to retain an aspect of the Cone of Increasing Diversity iconography. The TimeTrack in More than Dinosaursuses a device of a growing spiral of life, which is printed onthe ramp’s surface: each time the spiral re-appears, to mark the start of a new geologicalera, it has ‘grown’ to show some of the new life forms which evolved in that era. As aresult it begins with just a few organisms and gradually expands as the visitor walks upthe ramp, creating a cone-like image. However, when the visitor reaches the top of theramp they are presented with the alternative iconography embodied in the Tree of Life.This presentation of alternatives helps to illustrate that there are many ways of depictingevolutionary relationships, and it also fits well with the ‘browsing’ model which has beenexplicitly applied to the physical layout ofMore than Dinosaurs. Nevertheless, it wouldbe interesting to see detailed research on what the public actually takes away from thisdiversity.

Judging from the interviews, theMore than Dinosaursproject team do not appear tohave been explicitly concerned with issues of realism. The gallery’s final mix of ‘realistic’and conceptual elements seems to have resulted from the commitment to a diversity ofapproaches (a diversity which was perhaps unavoidable given the diverse views within theteam). Edgecombe commented that there was a continual debate between the scientists overthe correct balance between what he called ‘objects and concepts’.15

Wandering around a museum is an inefficient way to acquire the basics of palaeontology(or of any other science); most contemporary museums are all too aware that few visitorswill retain many facts when they leave. The browsing model and the ‘something foreveryone’ design philosophy are a product of this recognition and are explicitly linkedby MacDonald to a ‘supermarket mentality’ (above). It can be argued that the newgallery treats visitors primarily as consumers seeking entertainment, rather than—as in oldergalleries—as citizens seeking knowledge. However, even if commercial pressures (whichfor a publicly funded museum are also political pressures) make the emphasis on visitorsas consumers unavoidable, many of the philosophical problems associated with traditionalmuseum displays have not been solved by the new approach. In particular, the new-styledisplays still tend to retain the old pretence that the museum offers access to ‘nature’ or‘knowledge’ in an unmediated way by depicting scenes from the past as if seen ‘with ourown eyes, unproblematically’.18

A museum display can appear to be a ‘window onto knowledge’48 which makesTrubshaw’s Dilemma—the appropriateness of realistic visual language—particularly acutefor museum staff. Palaeontologists must use the available evidence to make plausibleinferences about the behaviour and environment of extinct species. Having done so, thedecision to use a skilled artist to make this theorizing accessible and interesting to thepublic is a reasonable one—particularly for a museum that must attract paying visitors inorder to remain open. Yet, as has been shown above, there are many complex problemsinherent in this process and there are no obvious solutions. One approach which might beeffective would be to make consciously self-referential displays which examine the historyand role of the museum itself, and explore the implications of changing fashions in displaytechniques. A careful use of humour or irony might also help to illuminate the provisional





nature of some of the guesswork on display.49 Whatever approach is chosen, museums willneed to contrast their recreations of hyper-reality with displays of ‘real reality’—the unique,authentic objects in their collections. As Stephen Gould commented in a recent essay:

Our task is hopeless if museums, in following their essences and respectingauthenticity, condemn themselves to marginality, insolvency and empty corridors.But, fortunately, this need not and should not be our fate. We have an absolutelywonderful product to flog—real objects of nature. We may never entice as manyvisitors asJurassic Park, but we can and do attract multitudes for the right reasons.Luckily—and I do not pretend to understand why—authenticity stirs the human soul.The appeal is cerebral and entirely conceptual, not at all visual. . . . A fibreglassTyrannosaurusmerits a good look; the real bones send shivers down my spine, for Iknow they supported an actual breathing and roaring animal some 70 million yearsago.50

However, a focus on objects, whether real or reconstructed, has its limitations if its sole aimis to get visitors to the museum. Equally important is to consider what they see when theyarrive and what they take away with them (apart from the inevitable T-shirts and plasticdinosaurs). In a recent publication on the future of natural history museums, James Secordcautions against treating museum visitors purely as consumers, noting that:

Viewing the public for knowledge as consumers, and knowledge itself as acommodity, has serious consequences for the image of science. Consumers expectfinished products, backed by something akin to a guarantee. When knowledge failsto deliver on its promises, by proving (as it eventually does) to be provisional,uncertain and open to controversy, the public all too easily becomes disillusioned.51

Objects of any sort are too easily ‘read’ as the end result of science, the ‘facts’which represent the conclusion of the complex processes of exploration, experimentationand debate. This is a closed model of science, within which the work of scientists—ofwhich controversy is an essential part—is marginalized, reduced to the role of tedious butunavoidable drudgery on the road to the ultimate goal of good, solid facts. Yet, this is simplynot what science is about. Perhaps, then, the real challenge for science museums is to presentscience as a collection of processes, not as a series of products. Doing so will not be easy,but controversy and debate are exciting, and imaginative displays which present them couldbe just as dramatic as roaring robot dinosaurs. However, if a museum is to successfully adoptthis ‘processes not products’ model of science, its displays must explicitly acknowledge thatnatural history museums are themselves part of these processes of science—their exhibitionsare as much a product of debate as any other scientific knowledge.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr Des Griffin, Director of the Australian Museum, Sydney, for permissionto conduct this research, and to the Museum staff for their help, particularly GregEdgecombe, Trish MacDonald, Bodo Matzick, Alex Ritchie and the Archives staff. I wouldalso like to thank Dr David Miller, Head of the School of Science and Technology Studiesat UNSW, who supervised this research.

References

1 Strahan, R., 1979,Rare and Curious Specimens: An Illustrated History of the Australian Museum(Sydney:Australian Museum), p.128.




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2 Personal interview with Trish MacDonald, 1995. As part of this research, interviews were conducted with fourmembers of theMore than Dinosaursproject team: Bodo Matzick (the primary designer), Trish MacDonald(one of two education officers on the team), and two of the main scientists on the team: Alex Ritchie (seniorpalaeontologist at the Australian Museum until the end of 1995) and Greg Edgecombe (who has now replacedAlex Ritchie as senior palaeontologist). All quotes from these four are taken from tapes of the interviews.

3 Rudwick, M.J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World(University of Chicago Press).

4 Gould, S.J., 1989,Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Meaning of History(Hutchinson, London). Seealso Gould, S.J., 1995, Cones and ladders: constraining evolution by canonical icons.Hidden Histories ofScience, edited by R.B. Silvers (New York: New York Review Books), pp.37–67.

5 Rudwick, M.J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World(University of Chicago Press), p.x.

6 Rudwick, M.J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World(University of Chicago Press), pp.227–228.

7 Rudwick, M.J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World(University of Chicago Press), pp.245–249.

8 Rudwick, M.J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World(University of Chicago Press), pp.241.

9 Gould, S.J., 1989,Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Meaning of History(Hutchinson, London),pp.27–45.

10 Gould, S.J., 1995, Cones and ladders: constraining evolution by canonical icons.Hidden Histories of Science,edited by R.B. Silvers (New York: New York Review Books), pp.37–67.

11 Gould, S.J., 1995, Spin doctoring Darwin.Natural History, 104(7), July, 6–9 and 70–71. Gould’s argumentimplies that it is desirable for humans to recognize what he sees as the full philosophical implicationsof Darwinism, because acknowledging our relative insignificance would make us more humble and lessdestructive. Whether this is desirable (or remotely practical) is obviously open to discussion, but sadly theissue lies outside the scope of this essay.

12 Gould, S.J., 1989,Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Meaning of History(Hutchinson, London),pp.27–28.

13 Personal interview with Alex Ritchie, 1996.14 Personal interview with Bodo Matzick, 1996.15 Personal interview with Greg Edgecombe, 1996.16 Trinkaus, E., and Shipman, P., 1994,The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind(London: Pimlico),

p.399.17 Lewin, R., 1987,Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins(Harmondsworth:

Penguin), p.59.18 Rudwick, M. J., 1992,Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World

(University of Chicago Press), p.vii.19 This fallacy is discussed in Gillespie, B., Eva, D., and Johnston, R., 1979, Carcinogenic risk assessment in the

US and Britain.Social Studies of Science, 9, 265–301.20 Rainger, R., 1991,An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Palaeontology at the

American Museum of Natural History(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press), pp.170–177.21 Rainger, R., 1991,An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Palaeontology at the

American Museum of Natural History(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press), p.163.22 Milner, R., 1995, Portraits of prehistory.Natural History,104(12), December, 44–47.23 Milner, R., 1995, Portraits of prehistory.Natural History,104(12), December, 44.24 The ‘truthfulness’ of Akeley’s work is also much more complex than it might initially appear. As Donna

Haraway points out, Akeley chose what he called ‘typical’ specimens for his dioramas, by which he meantphysically perfect male specimens: asymmetry, injury or disease debarred an animal from being ‘typical’. Onone occasion he even refused to shoot an elephant for a diorama because he believed that the animal wascowardly. See Haraway, D., 1989, Teddy bear patriarchy.Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in theWorld of Modern Science(New York: Routledge), pp.26–58. Apart from the obvious influence of culturally-determined notions of masculinity upon Akeley’s conception of ‘typical’, his thinking betrays a curious throw-back to pre-Darwinian ‘essentialism’, the notion that a species can be defined by a single, clearly definedessence and that variation from this essence is a deviation or flaw. Needless to say, for Darwinians variationsupplies the essential raw material upon which natural selection operates. It could be said, then, that variationis the main ‘truth’ of biology and, in many respects, Akeley’s ‘typical’ specimens are a fraud.

25 Milner, R., 1995, Portraits of prehistory.Natural History,104(12), December, 47.





26 Eco, U., 1995.Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality(London: Minerva), p.7.27 Quoted in Milner, R., 1995, Portraits of prehistory.Natural History,104(12), December, 47.28 Gilbert, G. N., and Mulkay, M., 1984,Opening Pandora’s Box: a Sociological Analysis of Scientist’s Discourse

(Cambridge University Press).29 Gilbert, G. N., and Mulkay, M., 1984,Opening Pandora’s Box: a Sociological Analysis of Scientist’s Discourse

(Cambridge University Press), pp.151–152.30 Gilbert, G. N., and Mulkay, M., 1984,Opening Pandora’s Box: a Sociological Analysis of Scientist’s Discourse

(Cambridge University Press), p.154.31 Gilbert, G. N., and Mulkay, M., 1984,Opening Pandora’s Box: a Sociological Analysis of Scientist’s Discourse




(Cambridge University Press), p.162.35 MacDonald, Sharon, 1995, Consuming science: public knowledge and the dispersed politics of reception

among museum visitors.Media, Culture and Society, 17, 21.36 Both quotes are from the text of theTracks Through Timeexhibition.37 Interestingly, Ritchie remembers the dioramas as having cost A$7000 (around£3200) each, and asserts that,

far from being given an acquisitions budget, he has always had to arrange fund-raising himself.38 See, for example, Ritchie, A., 1987, Testimony of the rocks, or geology versus the ‘Flood’. Confronting

Creationism, Defending Darwin, edited by D. R. Selkirk and F. J. Burrows (Sydney: UNSW Press), pp.49–72.39 Gould, S. J., 1989,Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Meaning of History(Hutchinson, London),

pp.194–206.40 Quote from the text ofMore than Dinosaurs. Edgecombe comments that theAnomalocarisreconstruction

which accompanies this text is already out of date, as new fossils have been discovered since it was completed.Personal interview with Greg Edgecombe, 1996.

41 An additional complicating factor for a museum attempting to balance the presentation of scientific factswith an accurate description of the scientific process, is that science museums tend to see their role as beingadvocates for science (especially at a time when they believe that many people hold ‘anti-science’ opinions).Given such perceptions, museum staff may see an emphasis on scientific error and uncertainty as unhelpfulto the ‘cause’ of science. Precisely this issue arose at London’s Science Museum during debates over theinclusion of a section on food poisoning within an exhibition on food science and technology. Some museumstaff saw the emphasis on food poisoning as inappropriate, on the assumption that the Museum’s role was to beunambiguously pro-science. MacDonald, S., and Silverstone, R., 1992, Science on display: the representationof scientific controversy in museum exhibitions.Public Understanding of Science, 1, 82.

42 Personal interview with Trish MacDonald, 1995.43 Robert Jones is another of the Museum’s palaeontologists. Both Jones and Edgecombe were members of the

More than DinosaursProject Team.44 A sophisticated model of such interactions is provided by Gillespie, B., Eva, D., and Johnston, R., 1979,

Carcinogenic risk assessment in the US and Britain.Social Studies of Science, 9, 265–301.45 As part of the research, the Museum’s archives onTracks Through TimeandMore than Dinosaurswere studied

in detail; however, much of the material they contain was not useful because it is undated and in most casesthe authors of documents are not identified. This is not surprising, since the Museum’s archivists are primarilyconcerned with recording financial and policy decisions, not with the esoteric issues discussed in this essay.

46 Shapin, S., 1984, Talking history.Isis, 75, 125–128.47 I am grateful to David Miller, at UNSW, for drawing this to my attention (personal communication, 27 March

1996).48 Haraway, D., 1989, Teddy bear patriarchy.Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern

Science(New York: Routledge), p.29.49 Gilbert and Mulkay make precisely this point in Gilbert, G. N., and Mulkay, M., 1984,Opening Pandora’s

Box: a Sociological Analysis of Scientist’s Discourse(Cambridge University Press).50 Gould, S. J., 1995, Dinomania.Dinosaur in a Haystack(New York: Harmony Books), pp.221–237.51 Jardine, N., Secord, J. A., and Spary, E. C., 1996,Cultures of Natural History(Cambridge University Press),

p.455.




206 J. Endersby

Author

Jim Endersby is a student in the School of Science and Technology Studies at theUniversity of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney 2052, Australia. E-mail address:[email protected]. He is currently doing Honours research on aspects of thehistory of botany and is planning to pursue similar topics at postgraduate level next year.




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