Watched a museum video that felt off and realized why

I was at the Natural History Museum in Denver last weekend looking at their dinosaur exhibit and a 3D animation on a screen caught my eye. The way the T. rex moved its jaw seemed too smooth and floaty like a video game cutscene instead of a real animal. Got me wondering if museums should put disclaimers on these reconstructions so people know what is accurate and what is artistic guesswork.

3 comments

3 Comments

mark_chen629d ago

I mean, I get what you're saying about the floaty jaw thing, but asking for disclaimers on every artistic choice seems like a slippery slope. Museums already label fossils vs. casts and note which bones are real. The walking with dinosaurs animation style is a known guesswork, like how we draw T. rex with feathers now even though we've never seen one. If they had a disclaimer for every muscle movement or skin texture, the whole exhibit would just be a wall of fine print.

hannah_west399d ago

Think about how much guesswork goes into the colors and patterns they paint on these animals too. We have no idea if a T. rex was striped like a tiger or just plain brown, so every museum display is basically a paleontologist's best guess at a paint job.

felixm299d ago

You hit on something with the "wall of fine print" because that's exactly what happens everywhere now. I was at a natural history museum last year and one of the dinosaur skeletons had a little sign saying "position of this bone is debated" and I just thought, man, at some point you gotta let people look at the cool skeleton. It reminds me of how recipes online have a whole novel before you get to the ingredients, or how every YouTube video has a sponsor segment explaining why the host is definitely not lying to you. We're so scared someone might get the wrong idea that we bury the actual thing under layers of warnings.