YOUR MOM’S A MAMMAL!: So today I finally got to see the new(ish) Hall of Mammals at the Museum of Natural History. It’s so awesome!!!

The old Hall was totally fun, but basically just stuffed animals in poses behind glass. I loved it, but I don’t think I ever learned much beyond, “Look! wolfs!” You needed more focus than a child can typically muster to not only read but also remember the wall captions.

The new Hall is improved in every way. The taxidermy is terrific: the leaping, clutching, clawing lionesses attacking their prey; the ickle vampire bat feasting on a fake human foot (!); the stalking jaguar and spraddle-legged giraffe and superb Cape porcupine. At least two critters were posed nursing at their mommies’ teats, which I thought was absolutely adorable.

The interactive displays are geared to a child’s level of ability and concentration, but manage to be fun and informative nonetheless. Guess which skull belongs to a nocturnal creature, and lift the flap for an answer! (It’s the one with the bigger eyesockets.) Find the food sources hidden in the autumn forest! What’s a monotreme, and why? (…Ew, is why, it turns out.) The new Hall understands that a “night monkey” is kind of cool, but “the world’s only night monkey” is much cooler. Kids get interesting debates and ideas that could lead to future reading and learning, presented in a way they could easily remember: There’s a dingo posed in spotlight, with a shadowed thylacine in the background; you can press a button to spotlight the thylacine, read a brief blurb on when the dingo displaced the thylacine, and see a photo of two dingos fastening on one prey animal, with an explanation that cooperative hunting is one reason the dingo may have triumphed over its ecological rival. There was really quite a lot of information in a brief caption, presented quickly but memorably, and in a way that engaged both reason and imagination.

I was really, really impressed. Wildly recommended!