Do you see the water and watch it flow and float an empty shell?

[sovay]

I just found out that my all-time favorite of the Smithsonian's exhibits, "Life in the Ancient Seas," ceased to exist in 2013. The fossil halls are being completely remodeled. It looks like a considerable, thoughtful undertaking. It is probably even scientifically necessary. At the moment I'm too stunned to appreciate it. I loved the fossil skeletons swimming before the full-scale murals of which they were the stony echoes, the shadowiness of its corridors and the sea-lighting, the petrified corals and the shells. The diorama of the Paleozoic reef. I wanted to swim in those waters, all the different millions of years of them. Ammonites, mosasaurs, armored fishes, euryptids, dugongs and diving birds and kelp swaying in the bubble-blue light. In 2005, I rejoiced that it still existed. I wish I had known in time to say goodbye.

[edit] Ely Kish, the painter of the murals, died last year. She gave me a wonderful dream of the sea's deep time. I would have preferred not to learn both of these facts within the same half-hour.

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

They took away the "people bones," too, in a fit of equal opportunism. Noel is so pissed, we haven't been back. (She spent many a fond minute sprawled lying atop the fauxmains [or possibly his real relics; the case didn't say] of Bartholomew Gosnold, 'looking right into the eyeholes of his BRAINCASE, Mama' until the Japanese tourists started taking pictures of her, too) and she loved the Egyptians' things, set out in fake situ on glittering sand. Gone also, with many of the best specimens from that area of the world, is the Iraqi Neolithic toddler who taught her that her very own mouth was fucking terrifying just by its osseous existence, and it looked JUST like that. I wish some things could just stay the same.

*hugs and thoughts of the deep sea's bones*