Royal Ontario Museum’s Saturday Morning Club for three years. It was an incredible experience for a kid like me, fascinated by dinosaurs and snakes and bats and gladiators and mummies. Every Saturday during the school year, we’d go down to the museum, getting in before it opened to the public. We’d congregate in the ROM theater—that’s what it was called before some overpriced consultant had decided we should rename it Theatre ROM. It had been quite grotty back then, and upholstered entirely in black; it’s since had a face-lift.
The mornings would start off with Mrs. Berlin, who ran the club, showing us a 16 mm movie, usually some short from the National Film Board of Canada. And then we’d head off for a half-day of activities in the museum, not just in the galleries but also behind the scenes. I loved every minute of it and made up my mind that someday I would work at the ROM.
I remember one day we were getting a demonstration from the artist responsible for many of the museum’s dinosaur reconstructions. He asked our assembled group what kind of dinosaur a pointed, serrated tooth he was showing us had come from.
“A carnosaur,” I’d said at once.
The artist had been impressed. “That’s right,” he said.
But another kid berated me later. “It’s carni vore , he said, not carnosaur.
Carnosaur was, of course, the correct word: it was the technical name for the group of dinosaurs that included tyrannosaurs and their kin. Most kids don’t know that; hell, most adults don’t know it.
But I knew it. I’d read it on a placard in the ROM’s Dinosaur Gallery.
The original Dinosaur Gallery, that is.
Instead of our current dioramas, that gallery had had specimens mounted so you could walk right around them; velvet ropes kept the public from getting too close. And each specimen had a lengthy, typed explanation in a wooden frame that would take four or five minutes to read.
The centerpiece of the old gallery was a Corythosaurus, a huge duckbill standing erect. There was something wonderfully Canadian, although I didn’t understand it as such at the time, about the ROM’s showcase dinosaur being a placid vegetarian instead of the ravenous T. rexes or the fiercely armed Triceratopses that were the major mounts at most U.S. museums; indeed, it wasn’t until 1999 that the ROM put a T rex cast on display, over in the kid’s Discovery Gallery. Still, that ancient Corythosaurus mount was wrong. We know now that hadrosaurs almost certainly couldn’t stand up like that; they probably spent most of their time as quadrupeds.
Every time I went to the museum as a kid, I made a point of looking at that skeleton, and the others, and reading the placards, and struggling with the vocabulary, and learning as much as I could.
We still have that skeleton at the ROM, tucked to the side of the Cretaceous Alberta diorama, but there’s no explanatory text associated with it anymore. Just a small Plexiglas sign that disingenuously glosses over the erroneous stance, and says little else:
Corythosaurus Excavatus Gilmore
A crested hadrosaur (duck-bill) mounted in an upright alert posture. Upper Cretaceous, Oldman formation (approximately 75 million years), Little Sandhill Creek, near Steveville, Alberta.
Of course, the “new” Dinosaur Gallery was a quarter-century old now. It had opened before Christine Dorati had come to power, but she considered it a model of what our displays should be like: don’t bore the audience, don’t weigh them down with facts. Just let them gawk.
Christine had a couple of daughters; they were grown now. But I often wondered if, when they were kids, she had been embarrassed at a museum. Perhaps she’d said, “Oh, Mary, that’s a Tyrannosaurus rex. It lived ten million years ago.” And her daughter—or, worse, some smart-aleck kid like I’d been—had corrected her with information that had been written on a lengthy placard. “That’s not a tyrannosaur, and it
The mornings would start off with Mrs. Berlin, who ran the club, showing us a 16 mm movie, usually some short from the National Film Board of Canada. And then we’d head off for a half-day of activities in the museum, not just in the galleries but also behind the scenes. I loved every minute of it and made up my mind that someday I would work at the ROM.
I remember one day we were getting a demonstration from the artist responsible for many of the museum’s dinosaur reconstructions. He asked our assembled group what kind of dinosaur a pointed, serrated tooth he was showing us had come from.
“A carnosaur,” I’d said at once.
The artist had been impressed. “That’s right,” he said.
But another kid berated me later. “It’s carni vore , he said, not carnosaur.
Carnosaur was, of course, the correct word: it was the technical name for the group of dinosaurs that included tyrannosaurs and their kin. Most kids don’t know that; hell, most adults don’t know it.
But I knew it. I’d read it on a placard in the ROM’s Dinosaur Gallery.
The original Dinosaur Gallery, that is.
Instead of our current dioramas, that gallery had had specimens mounted so you could walk right around them; velvet ropes kept the public from getting too close. And each specimen had a lengthy, typed explanation in a wooden frame that would take four or five minutes to read.
The centerpiece of the old gallery was a Corythosaurus, a huge duckbill standing erect. There was something wonderfully Canadian, although I didn’t understand it as such at the time, about the ROM’s showcase dinosaur being a placid vegetarian instead of the ravenous T. rexes or the fiercely armed Triceratopses that were the major mounts at most U.S. museums; indeed, it wasn’t until 1999 that the ROM put a T rex cast on display, over in the kid’s Discovery Gallery. Still, that ancient Corythosaurus mount was wrong. We know now that hadrosaurs almost certainly couldn’t stand up like that; they probably spent most of their time as quadrupeds.
Every time I went to the museum as a kid, I made a point of looking at that skeleton, and the others, and reading the placards, and struggling with the vocabulary, and learning as much as I could.
We still have that skeleton at the ROM, tucked to the side of the Cretaceous Alberta diorama, but there’s no explanatory text associated with it anymore. Just a small Plexiglas sign that disingenuously glosses over the erroneous stance, and says little else:
Corythosaurus Excavatus Gilmore
A crested hadrosaur (duck-bill) mounted in an upright alert posture. Upper Cretaceous, Oldman formation (approximately 75 million years), Little Sandhill Creek, near Steveville, Alberta.
Of course, the “new” Dinosaur Gallery was a quarter-century old now. It had opened before Christine Dorati had come to power, but she considered it a model of what our displays should be like: don’t bore the audience, don’t weigh them down with facts. Just let them gawk.
Christine had a couple of daughters; they were grown now. But I often wondered if, when they were kids, she had been embarrassed at a museum. Perhaps she’d said, “Oh, Mary, that’s a Tyrannosaurus rex. It lived ten million years ago.” And her daughter—or, worse, some smart-aleck kid like I’d been—had corrected her with information that had been written on a lengthy placard. “That’s not a tyrannosaur, and it
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