As featured on this morning's yahoo! news:
Exhibit: dragons, other mythic creatures
By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press Writer Fri May 25,
4:22 PM ET
NEW YORK -
Harry Potter would probably feel right at home here.
A new exhibit pairs an unusual subject — dragons and
other fantastic creatures — with an unlikely location:
a science museum. "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns
and Mermaids" opens Saturday at the American Museum of
Natural History and runs through Jan. 6
What's going on? Has one of the pre-eminent science
museums in the world made a discovery that would show
these creatures are real? No, no, the exhibit looks at
how people have come up with all kinds of myths and
stories to account for things they didn't understand.
"Across cultures and throughout time these creatures
are what people dreamed up as a way of interpreting
and making sense of the strange and often mindboggling
but real wonders of the natural world," said museum
President Ellen Futter.
The show gets right to it — at the entrance is a model
of a huge dragon.
Other displays include a huge bird known in mythology
as a roc, and the enormous head of a kraken, a
fearsome, many-tentacled creature of the deep.
The exhibit shows how cultures around the world came
up with such strange, mysterious creatures. Dragons,
for instance, can be found both in the East and West,
although they're considerably more benevolent in
Chinese culture than they are in Europe.
Another section shows how tall tales and exaggeration
can lead to the creation of a mythic creature. The
exhibit posits that the kraken may be based on
sightings of the corpses of giant squids, which have
been known to wash up on shores. Or that legends about
giant men or giant birds might come from people
finding fossils and trying to make sense of what kind
of creature could have had such large bones.
"Just like analytical science is one way of
interpreting the world, myth was a way people
interpreted the world up until quite recently," said
Mark Norell, the show's co-curator. "If you look at
all the mythical creatures ... they do have real
underpinnings in biology."
"We clothe our beliefs, we clothe our imaginations, we
clothe our fears and sometimes we do this with
incredible artfulness," said co-curator Laurel
Kendall. "It's the celebration of that human capacity
for artfulness and wonder that I think this show
witnesses."
The show was put together with collaborators including
the Field Museum in Chicago, the Canadian Museum of
Civilization in Gatineau; the Australian National
Maritime Museum in Sydney, and the Fernbank Museum of
Natural History in Atlanta. It will travel to those
locations after closing in New York.
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