Words Fail Me

I finally got around to visiting the Shanghai Natural History Museum that opened last year.  It has an interesting corkscrew design, half of it underground and with a central atrium.The roof is covered with a lawn which both reduces the building’s energy consumption and helps it blend in with the surrounding park.As with everything in China, the scale is impressive.
This nightmarish, crowded scene of birds reminded me of Niao Dao exhibits.  Some of the birds were suspended by single wires, twisting in a mockery of flight.Yeah, that’s how I felt.
Some of the taxidermy was…unfortunate.  Like this lobotomized lion.  I hadn’t realized how widely spread bears were across the planet.
Lots of wolves in China, too.  From this vantage, it felt like a stampede of long-dead species and reanimated skeletons.
My favorite bit was this cutaway model of a T. Rex with a motion sensor.  Little kids would wander up and the dinosaur would spring into life and roar.  Finally.  A practical museum exhibit.
This wall-length diorama of the savanna doubled as a giant projection screen.  Really nice audio-visual design of a passing thunderstorm.  These mounted bird heads lit from below felt like something out of a Nine Inch Nails music video directed by Mark Romanek.
The exhibits were biased toward species found in or native to China, which I appreciated.  This dinosaur is named Huaxiosaurus aigahtens.
This is a map of China on the floor marked with all the different soil types throughout the country with core samples for each.
Seeing this, I wanted to get my Star Wars action figures so I could play in the Malachite.  (Total Dark Side mineral name, right?)  The anthropological area of the museum was mostly empty and felt likeit was almost an afterthought.  Though, I did find this sign about alcohol production in China intriguing.
And tea types.  That’s when I started noticing that every map in the entire museum called out the (disputed) South China Sea islands as part of China, even if the islands weren’t relevant to the subject of the particular map.
I could not find an angle where I could capture the entire length of this impressive sauropod, the longest in the world.  I found the Chinese name intriguing:  中加马门溪龙 (Zhōng jiā mǎ mén xī lóng).  The 龙 made sense, because the word for dinosaur is 恐龙 (kǒnglóng meaning “fear dragon” which is kind of awesome.)  And 马门溪 makes sense because “mǎ mén xī” sounds like the Latin “Mamenchi”.  But 中 means “middle” and 加 means “to add” which didn’t make any sense to me until I read the plaque about how Chinese & Canadian scientists had made the discover.  The usual name for China is 中国 (Zhōngguó) and Canada is 加拿大 (Jiānádà) and they used the Chinese convention of taking a piece of one country or continent or whatever and the piece of another and joining them together, thus 中加 (Zhōng jiā)!