House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth by Richard ConniffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Like The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, this examines the natural history of a natural history museum. Unlike RotR, House goes beyond collections and recalls the history of the Peabody Museum itself, from how it initially began as collections in search of home, eventually given by George Peabody, uncle to O.C. Marsh of the Bone Wars. Marsh takes up over half the chapters of this book, as he should given his large personality.
I enjoyed how Conniff takes the story of the museum all the way into modern day, with the age of DNA and discoveries still being made from collection store rooms (deciphering fossilized ink, for example, came from one of Marsh's long forgotten invertebrate fossils). There are plenty of sidebars throughout chapters of other interesting stories of Peabody Museum curators and researchers who could easily have had their own chapters.
View all my reviews
