Lions and Tigers and Trilobites, Oh My!

They come for the flowers, they stay for the animals. The Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), like the other Harvard Museums of Natural History, is tucked away on Oxford Street behind the Science Center and is not easy to spot. People seek out the famed glass flowers--a surprisingly unluminous array of buds and leaves--and end up in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Actress Debra Eisenstadt, who is currently performing in The Sisters Rosenzweig at the Schubert, likes the flowers. She said, "It was amazing how human they seemed--how connected to what we are." but she serendipitously wandered into the MCZ and was soon hooked by the archeology exhibits.

The Museum of Comparative Zoology is a welcoming museum. The entrance features a bright orange temporary exhibit enthusiastically titled, "Everybody Likes Trilobites--The Exhibit." It's a user-friendly exhibit that informs visitors, "Time treated the trilobites pretty well," and draws them further into the museum with a flourish: "This way to more fossil in vertebrates!"

The museum combines dispassionate nineteenth-century taxonomy and wondrous admiration of the animals featured. Founded by Louis Agassiz in 1859 at the height of the craze to classify all of nature, the museum set out to acquire a specimen of everything in the natural world. The result is an incredible, albeit slightly dusty, collection--from the duck-billed platypus to the yak--displayed in wooden and glass cases under fluorescent light.

"Exhibits in those days were natural warehouses," said Ed G. Haack, the Director of Exhibits at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. "Today, we want them to be didactic, inspiring." And they are inspiring. The captions in the cases read like a zoological Jenny Holzer: "Fossils are geological stopwatches....The isolation of South America led to the evolution of bizarre animals....X-rays expose the past."

The newer exhibits make some use of modern technology. The Sound Production Morphology Exhibit allows visitors to hear dolphin and whale sounds at the touch of a button, and complementary computer-generated graphs display their frequencies. The real thrill of the museum, however, lies in exhibits which haven't been touched for years.

Though the museum hasn't had a taxidermist on staff since before World War II, the museum accumulated plenty of specimens before then. Animals are displayed somewhat hap-hazardly, crowded into cases with other animals from the same continent, but not necessarily similar habitats. No effort is made to contextualize the displays. There are no expansive diaramas with fake vistas extending to the horizon. The rhinocerous and the elephant, the gazelle and the gnu, all share a partitioned glass case with a sky-blue backdrop. Are renovations in store? Perhaps the MCZ will repaint the cases, said Bob Davidson, Assistant Director of Exhibits.

Such frippery is superflous at the MCZ--the animals steal the show. Roommates Bonnie A. Pelly '96 and Bethany M. Lemann '96 came to the museum for a Biological Sciences 2 lab, and returned to check out the rest of the museum. "I liked the sperm whale's pelvic bones and the big dinosaur fossil. I love evolution. I love dolphins. I love primates," gushed Lemann.

One hundred thousand people per year come to see horseshoe crabs, turtle shells, zebras, gazelles, peacocks, bison, oxen, ostriches, apes, geese, and coelocanths. Visitors are alumni, tourists, and school groups but remarkably few Harvard students.

Marianne Zaslavsky, 9, of Needham is a science museum connoisseur, and prefers the Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Boston Science Museum because of the sheer number of animals on display. "I love birds," she said. "Mom, look at this guy. He looks like he has a wart." Twelve-year-old Michael Horton likes trilobites. "It's neat to see fossils and the stones they were fossilized in and their texture," he said.

The museum is not for the squeamish, however. After all, except for the fossilized skeletons, the animals were captured alive in the wild and then stuffed and preserved with arsenic. Many show signs of age. Most of the specimens are at least fifty years old. Davidson points out that some are "mounted like trophies--that really dates them. It's a different way of looking at animals.

Indeed, complementing the fifty-foot finback whale hanging from the ceiling in the last exhibit room is a model of a whaling ship and an eyewitness account of a harpooning expedition which yielded "83 barrels of oil and 1000 pounds of whalebone, worth in 1884 $4050."

But there is a humorous side to the museum as well. At Christmastime, a santa's cap adorned the forty-two-foot-long, 135-million-year-old Kronosaurus queenslandicus. The door of the Mollusc Department sports a red-construction paper and lace doily valentine with decorated with pearly shells. The case of an ancient pachyderm is entitled, "Teleoceras--A Preposterous Rhinocerous."