Sunday, January 21, 2007
In my spare time I have been occupying myself lately on Wikimedia, which is the open source repository for multimedia files, and a companion (and complementary source of info) to Wikipedia. I had been organizing pictures I had taken just before Xmas at some of the Royal Ontario Museum's galleries on the site. In the end I managed to get a good collection together of most of the more significant items on display in the Egyptian and First Nations galleries there.
<flashback>Back in September 2005 I heard on the radio that the dinosaur gallery was going to close down for renovations. So I made a point of heading there with my camera in hand as I knew that what they were likely to replace the gallery with would be a lot different. Undoubtedly improved and updated, but I wanted to capture that the essence of what was undoubtedly a dated display, reminiscent of the state of the art circa the late 60s. There were the small dioramas featuring attacking dinosaurs set at about knee-height for me, designed for young kids to peer at and ponder. Then there was the display of a dino digger at the Hunter Quarry, his jack hammer now a museum-piece, and a fine layer of dust covering everything. Or the gallery of primate evolution, featuring black and white pictures of people from many different cultures arranged on branches of a tree of life, with a picture or two of a hippie chick solidly dating the display to another era. Or the full-sized dioramas featuring the bones of animals posed around a section of a mock LaBrea Tar Pit, clawing away at the unfortunate animals that had already succumbed. I took pictures of the lot, with the intention of putting together a mini-gallery on my own blog site at some point in the future.</flashback>
So I have all of these photos from the old dino gallery. I had even invested the time into putting photo-collages together of some of the larger displays. So I found the original pictures I had shot, did some judicious cropping and retouching of them in PhotoShop, and posted a bunch of them as the preferred PNG format to Wikimedia. Voila! an online gallery of what used to be on display at the ROM.The sole exception was an animated GIF file I had constructed of a peephole display showing an Australopithecus skull "morphing" using light and mirrors into the face of living female of that long-dead primate.
If you are interested in a tour of the old dino gallery at the ROM, go to (url) to see what I uploaded. Until the museum opens the new dino gallery (supposedly for sometime later this year) this will have to do.
Labels: Ancient Egypt, First Nations, Royal Ontario Museum, Wikimedia Commons
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