Museum of Natural History in Toulouse
The museum recently reopened. That was the first sentence for an old post. It reopened in January of this year. Jean-Jacques and I went to the museum. This post beginning has been saved for like 6 weeks. I figured I should finish it somehow.
The museum was free to enter for like the first week it had reopened. There were enormous lines but we braved them one day to go. The museum is located in an ancient brick building but the building has a contemporary steel and glass addition on its backside. This addition overlooks the gardens. It was January when we went and the gardens were nice but in Spring I am sure it is fantastic. Maybe we’ll go back and take pictures.
The museum is a whirlwind tour of natural history. Of course it has the usual bones and stones you’d expect from a natural history museum, but there is also a nice technology component. There are computer simulations of how the continents separated and formed what is now known as the earth and it continues into the future to what the world is projected to look like. There is also a platform you can stand on with about 15 other people and it simulates an earthquake, after having lived in CA we didn’t feel the need to do this. There were all sorts of interactive projections as well. It was a nice mixture and the presentation of the exhibits was excellent. Note to reader, it is huge, you need a lot of time and probably many days to properly see it.
I have never liked seeing taxidermied animals. The museum has huge rooms full of them. For some reason it didn’t bother me this time. They have a wide collection of animals. There were many animals that looked like crosses between animals I knew. Go to the cat/lion/tiger/mammal section. There are some very adorable looking creatures there.
Below are some links. They are in French but the pictures are very nice so don’t worry if you don’t speak French.
I like museums of this kind, although in all our trips to Paris, we have not yet made it to the natural history musée there.
I used to like them and then I went through a period where I didn’t really like them but now with techonological integration they are exciting again. Not that everything needs to be flashy but the simulations on the computer of what life was probably like and what it will probably be like were great. Sure we see it all the time in the movies but knowing that these are the theories of scientists who study this kind of thing made it more interesting than a movie director’s take on it.