The horror! The horror! And this isn't one of the freaky ones. |
I haven’t found the ability to mix writing and traveling. Between spending my day doing tourism and writing in my journal at night, I find that there’s no other time for writing. Instead of blogging about my day’s experiences, the last time I travelled, I wrote up a series of blog posts (largely on Esperanto) several days in advance. But in a way, it was good to save writing about the Lausanne Museum of Zoology until now, October 31.
The museum is an a building that houses a number of collections, including a numismatic collection, a geology collection, and an archeology collection. The fine arts museum should have been there, but the collection is currently in storage, awaiting a new home. The museum is open and they have temporary shows, which makes me wonder why they don’t have their collection up, since the new building won’t open until 2017, but I assume they’re doing various behind-the-scenes sort of things, such as preparing new cases, and determining new arrangements.
You may find images below this point disturbing. You have been warned.
Good Lord! What are those things? |
And then there, deep in the collection, is a group of animals with various birth defects. It’s clear that the zoology professors of the University of Lausanne in some past era sent out word to the local farmers that they were interested in animals that had been born with serious deformations. Now, as I said, taxidermy creeps me out, because it always seems to have an evil twin. If you’re not arranging dead mice in tableaux, you’re stuffing and mounting deformed animals.
The cow found this calf too demanding. |
I am quite certain that the sheep for which two bodies share one head (sort of averages out, right?) couldn’t have lived for very long at all, and was probably delivered dead. There’s no doubt about the sheep without a head, right? That one clearly never used those legs to walk about.
That's freaky. |
Not a big eater. |
Or is it that you don’t dare look away?
As I noted, I was pretty much alone in my walking through the museum. Everyone once in a while, I would get a glimpse of someone else wandering through the collections. It was middle of the week and there are other things to do in Lausanne. I have no doubt that when the museum put these specimens on display, they knew exactly what they were doing: they meant to shock and fascinate. After all, specimens of the variety of lizards found in various regions of the world can only capture the imagination for so long. After a while, you need your monsters.
Hey there little…ohmigod! |
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