On January 4 I drove for an hour north to Cartersville, Georgia, to visit Tellus, the Northwest Georgia Science Museum. I\u2019d driven past the place many times (you can see it from Interstate 75 whenever you go that way to the mountains, Chattanooga, or other points north) and kept meaning to spend a day there; on this day I finally did.<\/p>\n
Georgia doesn\u2019t have many science museums, and those we do have are often on the brink of bankruptcy. There\u2019s certainly nothing to rival the American Museum of Natural History<\/a>\u00a0(AMNH), the Smithsonian\u2019s Air and Space Museum<\/a>, or Chicago\u2019s Field Museum<\/a>. In the Atlanta area we have the Fernbank Science Center<\/a>\u00a0(FSC)\u00a0and Fernbank Museum<\/a>\u00a0(which, despite the name \u201cFernbank,\u201d are unaffiliated with each other).<\/p>\n The AMNH in New York City seems to have all the money in the world, so it can attract world-class personnel and exhibits, and it definitely has world-class facilities. The same goes for the Field Museum, which is the most impressive natural history museum I\u2019ve ever been in.<\/p>\n In Atlanta, Fernbank Science Center probably has the least resources. It\u2019s owned and run by the school system of DeKalb County, Georgia\u2019s, and it\u2019s been a standard field trip destination for Atlanta area school kids for the last five decades. FSC does a lot with a little. In addition to the exhibits, there\u2019s a good telescope and planetarium. Many of the exhibits are just taxidermied animals in dioramas, but they\u2019re really good<\/em>\u00a0taxidermied animals in dioramas. And the Apollo 6 command module, which was uncrewed but did go into space, is on display there, too.<\/p>\n Fernbank Museum is twenty years old, has lavish facilities, and brings big touring exhibitions like Darwin<\/em>, which was there two years ago. It\u2019s no Smithsonian, but it\u2019s probably the best natural history museum a city like Atlanta can have.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know how Tellus would compare to either Fernbank. Cartersville\u2019s a small town, beyond the Atlanta suburbs but not far enough north to be a destination for mountain vacationers, so I couldn\u2019t guess if it would be very well funded. It began in 1983 as the Weinman Mineral Museum, built by the owners of a nearby barite<\/a>\u00a0mine. I hadn\u2019t heard of barite before, but it seems to be in everything these days. Synthetic rubber and filler materials in plastic and paint are made from it. The original museum\u2019s collection is now the Weinman Mineral Gallery. The mineral museum closed in 2007 and reopened as Tellus a few months later. \u201cTellus,\u201d the museum\u2019s literature told me, is an alternate name for Terra, the Greek goddess of the Earth.<\/p>\n Just inside the lobby is the Great Hall, which showcases a full-scale cast of an Apatosaurus skeleton. The other rooms are the Fossil Gallery, an exhibit of historic vehicles called Science In Motion, a special exhibits room, the \u201cCollins Family My Big Backyard,\u201d which was a roomful of hands-on things for kids, a planetarium, and a lecture theater.<\/p>\n The Fossil Gallery has casts instead of actual fossils, which I think is true for most fossil displays these days. They represent eras from the Precambrian (stromatolites) all the way up through the Pleistocene (giant sloths and mastodons).<\/p>\n There was something odd in this gallery. In front of a fossil of a plesiosaur was a plaque bearing a reproduction of the infamous \u201cSurgeon\u2019s Photo<\/a>\u201d of the Loch Ness Monster, with the caption \u201cThe legendary Loch Ness Monster was once thought to be a plesiosaur that somehow survived the end of the Mesozoic. It has since proven to be a hoax.\u201d<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t sure what this caption meant. Yes, the Surgeon\u2019s Photo seems to be of a creature that looks like a plesiosaur, and the photo was \u201cproven to be a hoax.\u201d But the plaque caption as written seems to be saying that the Loch Ness Monster itself is what has been proven to be a hoax.<\/p>\n Of course the Loch Ness Monster is not a hoax. It is a legend or myth about a creature or species that roams the loch. Many cryptozoologists over the decades have claimed to see the monster or to find evidence of its existence, and many of these claims have been exposed as hoaxes. Furthermore, many of the alleged sightings of the monster have been of creatures that resembled plesiosaurs, but many others have looked like sea serpents, or giant fish, or crocodilians. To say the notion that the Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur \u201cis a hoax\u201d makes no sense at all. After my visit I emailed the museum to request clarification, and got this unexpectedly thoughtful response from the executive director, Jose Santamaria:<\/p>\n We do acknowledge in the text that the “monster” is a legend by starting the sentence “the legendary Loch Ness Monster…” It is the photograph has been proven to be a hoax.<\/p>\n We mention the plesiosaur connection to address popular misconceptions created and promoted by the photograph. This misconception is due because the image in the photograph resembles cartoon and B-movie images of plesiosaurs in swan-line poses. Physiologically, this would have been impossible for these creatures. Paleobiologists have determined that the neck could not have articulated back in that manner, and actually articulated downwards. Assertions by cryptozoologists that the “monster” is a part of a group of surviving plesiosaurs that became trapped in the lake is also untrue. Loch Ness formed between 10 million and 10,000 years ago, while plesiosaurs became extinct about 68 million years ago. There is too much time in between for these ocean-dwelling animals to have survived, undocumented in the fossil record, and then end up in an inland freshwater lake gouged by glaciers and filled by melting glacial ice.<\/p>\n So, the Loch Ness Monsters, in whatever form it is supposed to be, is a legend with no scientific backing. The photo on the panel and associated “witness accounts” are part of a hoax. Current belief in the Loch Ness Monster is pseudo-science.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m extremely impressed that Mr. Santamaria took the time to reply in such detail, and that he knows so much about the lore surrounding “Nessie” and cryptozoology. He used the skeptical buzzwords \u201ccryptozoologists\u201d and \u201cpseudo-science,\u201d so he clearly talks the talk. I\u2019m especially impressed since he\u2019s not a scientist; his only degree is a bachelor\u2019s in visual art, painting, and art history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll talk about the rest of the museum\u2019s galleries in a separate post. For now I\u2019ll continue with the dinosaur theme and skip ahead to my favorite part of the outing, a lecture<\/a>\u00a0in the theater by Brian Switek<\/a>\u00a0about his new book My Beloved Brontosaurus<\/a>. He talked about the dinosaur family tree, their relationship to birds, why they went extinct, whether they had feathers, and the Brontosaurus\/Apatosaurus dichotomy that most laypeople (myself included) keep having trouble understanding.<\/p>\n I learned here about the \u201crecurrent laryngeal nerve,\u201d which extends from the brain down under the aorta and then loops back up to the larynx, thus traveling twice as far as it should need to. All vertebrates have it, and its poor design is no big deal unless you\u2019re a giraffe or a dinosaur.<\/p>\n I also learned that, contrary to the children\u2019s books about dinosaurs I consumed during elementary school, dinosaurs didn\u2019t have hindbrains controlling their tails. The belief that they did is so well entrenched that many of the websites I Googled just now still report it as fact.<\/p>\n