Smithsonian Dinosaur exhibit closing for 5 yrs
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...y.html?hpid=z4

Smithsonian natural museum dinosaur exhibit will close for 5 years starting the end of April for remodeling and just gutting the places and rebuild it and bring it to the 21st century.

Yes, government works slowly.

I wonder if this will be another case of expanding retail at the expense of exhibits? A few years back they pretty much destroyed the plant paleo section when they put a cafe in the space.

Not that long ago, at Smithsonian museums, you went to the basement for a decent cafe. The musuem shops had great book sections and souvenirs that were not junk. Not these days. Seems the museums are trending toward more space for retail than for exhibits.

Worse, new exhibits tend to force teach us. Instead of showing a range of artifacts, they tend to be heavy on reading and light on viewing. If I want to read, I'd buy a nice book and sit in my favorite chair.

So here's my prediction:

- expanded gift shop
- expanded dining
- far fewer artifacts on display. Those that are displayed will be surrounded by "context", since we need to be "taught" when we view.
- If we're really unlucky, they'll do like they did at the Museum of the American Indian, and focus on the cultural aspects of the dinos. After all, they had families and social interactions, no?

mmkay, I know what you mean to say, but the whole POINT of NMAI was that indigenous people got lumped in with the dino bones and taxidermy curiosities at NMNH, and there were very good reasons that was felt to be objectionable.

We are pretty bummed out about the lack of dinos in our household, also.

I gotta say, this was WAY overdue. I went through the SMNH the other day with my dad and it looked like it hadn't been renovated since he was born. It was almost kind of interesting in a "museum of the museum" way to see how they put together an exhibit that clearly had not been updated since the late 80s or early 90s.

5 years is kind of a bummer, though.

5 years is utterly ridiculous.

They built the Empire State Building in the Depression in 9 months and the Pentagon in 16 months in the 1940s.

Please, this is a quasi-governmental organization.

The interesting thing is that the curators insist they want to re-do all the bones. No more smooth, all one color/texture bones. Each bone will be broken down into its parts, and reassembled with color coded filler.

I'm sure we were all hungry for a "real" dino skeleton, with all the patches showing? After all, who ever knew that the bones have blotches, stripes and such? (who cares?).

At any rate, this re-imaging (re-assembly?) of all the bones is what will take so long. Of course, they couldn't do it one skeleton at a time, could they?

You can always go to the National Zoo to try to find the few animals they have left! Just don't expect any hippos, rhinos giraffes or polar bears, for example. All gone. Do expect, though, to have a nice challenge finding those animals that are there, since their "natural" environments mean they have lots of hiding places.

This is progress?

Quite on the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised by how comparisons between artifacts are the focus of the new Hall of Human Origins at NMNH (which shares the same controversial patrons with this project). At the extremely artifact-centric end is the relatively-new Luce Center at SAAM.

Yeah - it would definitely be better if all the animals were in concrete bowls so we wouldn't have to strain our eyes to try to find them.

And I agree - who wants lots of information available about the exhibits. I'd much rather just make up facts about what I'm seeing, regardless of whether they have any basis in reality.