Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, is a curio cabinet of obscure relics and extinct beliefs. "Jurassic" is metaphorical; no dinosaurs here.

We wandered in late on a drizzly day. No one else was there. A bearded attendant finally appeared from nowhere. He apologized for the smell of a dog-doo and incense (a dog had just had an accident). He directed us to watch an introductory slide show in a shrine-like alcove.

A voice began in sonorous tones describing how the word “museum” should be a place dedicated to the muses. We explored the dark, narrow rooms and hallways, passing through doorways framed with heavy Victorian curtains. The displays included.

• Micromosaics made from the scales of butterly wings.
• Stereo floral radiographs of Albert Richard.
• Vectography (an obscure 1940s technique for overlapping 3-D images)
• Microminiature figures carved by Hagop Sandaldjian, figures so small they easily fit inside the eye of a needle.
• A bell wheel, known as an arca musarithmica,
• And displays of forgotten folk cures, like two dead mice on a piece of toast given to a child to cure stuttering.

The strange exposition that the museum offered had its desired effect, and roused the muses.

“Teaching,” quoting 18th Century museum pioneer Charles Willson Peale, “is a sublime ministry inseparable from human happiness. The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar - guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.”
Fodor's Review of the Museum