Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Second Day in Montreal: "Increasing Knowledge Leads to Triumphant Loss in Clarity"
I awoke and when I looked out the window, and found that a gentle but steady snow consisting of thick snowflakes had made the place a winter wonderland. Dressed, showered and pressed my clothes and headed out for a trudge in the immediate neighbourhood, mainly for the pressing need to find a bank machine, but also to just get an initial look around and get a lay of the immediate area in which I was staying. I discovered a Starbucks one block west of where I was staying, which made the excursion worthwhile.

The day at the firm we were visiting was a good one, though it took longer than I had anticipated, lasting until just after 3pm. Instead of heading straight back to the hotel I asked our cabbie to take me to the Redpath Museum instead. It is not open on a Saturday so this would be my only chance to go and see it. The cabbie was obviously not familiar with the place and a map had to be pulled out so that he understood where I wanted to go. My business companion was tired, so I handed over sufficient fare to ensure that he could get back to the hotel, which was a relatively short walk away from the McGill campus where the museum is located.

Love this museum. It is relatively small but it has been around a long time, so some of its exhibits date back to a time before interpretative displays became commonplace. This makes it sound like more of a throwback than it actually is, as most of the items on exhibit accompanied by sometimes extensive information, but are all housed in lavish wooden housings harkening to earlier curatorial times. I took many pictures, the afternoon light streaming in from the uppermost windows of the main atrium providing an excellent opportunity to take flash-less pictures. I took a panoramic set of shots of the main display hall, which was empty of other visitors when I went in. The result is below:

With a digital camera there's little reason not to take shots of things since memory is cheap, so I deliberately took pictures of much of the explanatory text for several of the fossil exhibits, in part so that I could read up on and properly identify the items I was taking pictures of, and also as possible source material for future Wikipedia entries I might be able to usefully contribute to. So in addition to pictures of "Zeller" the Albertosaur erected in the middle of the hall, I also took pics of a Chinese tooth-extractor's advertising banner filled with the teeth he had pulled (conjuring visions of dentistry I am glad I have never experienced), to examples of Chimu pottery, and roman mosaic work. Other pictures I just took for the beauty of the subject, such as the self-entangled arms of the basket star, to the many specimens of fine shells neatly displayed in rows of display cases arranged by size and colour, almost glowing in the light of the late afternoon.

I also took note of some of the more humourous signs that appointed the doors of some of the professors and their post-doc students who have their office here, my favourite being a quote from a paper by Romer called "Synopsid Dentition and Evolution" dating to 1961 that says "Here, as everywhere in paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss in clarity". This is complimented by a paper sign below it identifying the lab as the Larsson-Carroll Lab [of/for?] Deep Time Specialists', which sports a suitably quizzical-looking ostrich, whose expression seemed to suggest that it was similarly suffering from a "loss of clarity".

While the collection of pre-Cambrian Burgess shale fossils is dwarfed by the number and variety on display at the R.O.M., I was impressed by the examples of even earlier Ediacara and Stromalite fossils on view. I also appreciated the token display devoted to the Hadean period, studied with meteorites which date to the time when the earth was still forming out of the planetary nebula that gave it birth.

Couldn't help but remember the last time I was here, which was when I was with both Bryce and Toby. Somewhere I have a goofy shot of Toby's arm seemingly being consumed by the hole in the spine of a whale, and Bryce mugging beside another sign saying "Beware Thou the Mutant", and the brief but illuminating talk we had with the evolutionary professor whose sign that was, which led us all to attend a guest lecture at a nearby building on the "frozen earth" hypothesis, which was my introduction to that subject. Toby is now dead, and Bryce is no longer resident in Montreal. That was a fun trip, which contained at least one night's session making enjoyably bad Miscellaneous 'S' music, but one which will unfortunately never be repeated, at least not with the original line-up.

When I got back to my hotel room, I passed out on the bed and had my first decent sleep since the beginning of the trip.