Tridented Trilobites and Giant Squid: The Sant Ocean Hall

My old college friend and NIH postdoc Laurie Waters with an actual GIANT SQUID. It wasn't so long ago scientists were still debating whether these actually existed.

Washington, DC, did not disappoint. The highlight was the Sant Ocean Hall in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, newly opened a year ago after a major remodeling of the cross hall it sits in. The hall soars and boasts a life-size whale model; the exhibits beckon with enticing photographs, movies, and a spherical screen on which swirling ocean currents flow across a spinning globe to eerily convincing effect. Welcome to the future.

A brief tour of my favorites . . .

Above is the super-awesome giant squid, appropriately locked inside a riveted metal case lest it suddenly come back to life, break the glass, and start pillaging and marauding the museum. It was the first time I had seen a specimen in real life, and I must confess that although it was suitably enormous, it seemed smaller (but not shorter) than I expected. That is, of course, easy for me to say as I stand there staring at it from the right side of a riveted glass case, and would, perhaps, be less so were I to encounter one in its natural milieu. As I often say when explaining why I won’t hike solo in the backcountry, I’m really quite snackable. The specimen in the case above is the female; the male was smaller and displayed in an ID4-aliens-suspended-in-goo style pose in a case nearby. Very cool, boys.

Here’s the entrance to the biodiversity display, with perhaps my least favorite part of the exhibit: a boring definition of biodiversity. “Marine biodiversity is the varity of life in the ocean. It is enormously complex. Scientists try to make sense of this diversity by organizing marine organisms according to evoluntionary . . . zzzz” Come on, guys! You can do better than that! How about “Biodiversity is the blizzard of lifeforms that coat the planet with bizarre beauty. It is nematode trapping fungi, slime nets, and nudibranchs that ripple through the water like Spanish dancers. . . ”

Sigh. Fortunately, the rest of the exhibit made up for this lapse. Although organized a bit confusingly, it was a nice blend of museum specimens, photographs, and strategically chosen videos that startled viewers with short clips of subjects like cephalopods’ astounding shapeshifting abilities. Some examples:

Laurie again, with the echinoderms.

Various worms, including gorgeous polychaete annelid christmas tree worm at upper left.

The very cool Ediacaran fossil of Tribrachidium, a pillow-like creature from what is commonly referred to as life’s first experiment in multicellularity. This is one of my very favorite organisms ever, and dates from over 550 million years ago. And what a stunning fossil! They had many other famous Ediacaran specimens.

And they had crinoids, or sea lillies, galore. I am sorry my photos didn’t come out better, because these specimens preserved incredible detail. Many had the architectual gestalt of gothic cathedrals. Here is a better photo from National Geographic.

And then there was this fantastic beauty — I had never seen or heard of anything like this in my life, and I even made it halfway through “Trilobites” by Richard Fortey:

There’s really only one acronym for this: W.   T.   F.

As you can see in the placard, the Hail Mary Pass of paleontology is “It may have been used for mating.” (Props to Laurie for pointing that out. : ) )

No ocean hall is complete without a giant jellyfish.

And no visit to Ocean Hall is complete without getting a fuzzy, out of focus shot of oneself with said giant jellyfish.

This picture pretty much sums up my feelings on the Sant Ocean Hall, in spite of its relatively minor shortcomings. For another perspective, see this review by the New York Times.