Dinosaur Tiime

Unless you're addicted to PBS documentaries, the name O.C. Marsh and Hiram Bingham probably won't mean much to you.  We 'did' another Yale Museum

yesterday - The Peabody.  This is their museum of natural history and it's sort of a miniature of the New York City Natural History Museum.  As I'm discovering, if they are willing to put in on display in Bulldog Land, then it's of the first order.  My favorite portion of the museum was the Connecticut Bird exhibition.  That said, I will be SO glad when someone figures out it's just a little creepy to show dead stuffed birds.  They remind me of 'hair art'.  This was a Victorian invention.  Pictures, or even worse, jewelry was made out of the hair of a dead loved one to commemorate the loss.  Morbid, morbid, morbid.  Hundreds of perched, pecking, flying, preening stuffed birds evokes the same shudder.

I love birds, and I'm starting to be able to identify more and more of them when I see them.  Understand, I'm in first grade in the birder world, but I do get a thrill whenever I'm able to identify one. All of I'm saying is that I'd rather see a twenty second video of a live bird than a mounted, stuffed one.  They did have one bird you wouldn't be able to get a video of.  They had a dodo.  

Dodos have gotten the rap of being stupid, and their name has come to mean a stupid person.  Actually, they evolved on Mauritius Island where they didn't have any natural predators and had access to an unlimited food supply.  The result was the more ground plants and seeds they ate, the less they used their wings which began to atrophy and become out of proportion to the size of their ever increasing bodies until they could neither fly nor could they run fast. Along come humans, and nicely fill the niche of 'predator'.  The dodo is the first recorded species whose extinction was a direct result of human beings.  The passenger pigeon also comes to mind as one of these early casualties.

The showy part of the natural history collection are their dinosaurs.  O. C. Marsh, a Yale professor, was one of the first successful dinosaur bone hunters.  He has a bit of a tragic finale, but you can look him up.  In his heyday, he brought back to New Haven thousands of pounds of bones.  Many have been assembled into skeletons resulting in this hall.  This is one of those big plant eaters.

The museum was more interesting than I anticipated.  There is a wonderful section of dioramas showing natural habitats of various climates in the United States.  The 'desert' section looked real familiar.  There was also a very interesting history of hominids (that's us) with bronze casts of skulls of our 'cousins' mounted next to bronze casts of a skull of a homo sapien.  It was a great visual of what is usually presented 2D.  

Finally, who was Hiram Bingham III?  He was a Yale professor who went looking in Peru for the lost city of the Incas, and he found it:  Macchu Pichu. He single handedly invented Incan archaeology  and as a result brought home thousands of artifacts from the sites he excavated.  In 2011, Yale returned all those artifacts to the grateful government of Peru.  That action impressed me more than all the collections put together.     

As always, if you want to look at the rest of the pix - here they are:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/115478608971584948192/albums/5902488629502656801?authkey=CMje75uJ797Q1QE

  

A Load of Bricks

 Art Museum at Yale about four hot walkable blocks from the apartment. I don't lug my computer with me, and thus, I'm finding that my window to actually write is pretty small. 

We walk a lot here.  Yale is on the edge of downtown New Haven, and New Haven was founded in 1638.  They didn't exactly plan for cars.  Even if we wanted to driveI'm starting to get rumblings again from the bushes.  It's definitely time to 'get on the stick' and write a blog.  Interestingly, I looked that up - get on the stick - and discovered the origin goes back to the beginning of the 18th century when, in preparation for getting off your keester and leaving, you selected a stick and transformed it into a walking aid.  If it were only so easy to 'get going' writing.  Actually, it's not the writing that's the problem...it's the weather.  

NEWSFLASH!  It's very hot in Connecticut.  This week the temps are going to be in the mid 90's and the humidity is hovering about 80% most of the time.  At last count, we are up to five fans in 546 square feet.  The only way to handle this is to be GONE.  We have gotten adept at finding air conditioned spaces.  So far the best 'free' seats are at the British somewhere, it's usually not feasible when we are in the center of town.  One of the smooth spots of these walks is we get to admire the

architecture of the campus.  It's pretty sprawled out after 300+ years, but there are a core of buildings which are constructed to evoke the "look at me, I'm important" feeling.  The structural details of many remind me of elaborate sand castles since they are covered with swirls, squiggles, points, arches, curves, cupolas, statues, and gargoyles, and are often constructed of limestone, or limestone is used as embellishment since it's so carveable.

The oldest building on campus is a red brick building with not a bit of limestone.  There's not too much brick construction anywhere in this area. The residences are mostly clapboard, and most of the big old buildings are stone and the big new buildings are glass.  Anyway, this is Connecticut House - it was the first building of that new college Yale.  It was built about 1700.  It's been tweaked over the centuries including adding an entire third floor.  It was the dormitory of this guy,

Nathan Hale.  You might have heard of him.  Nathan rates a statue around here.  He stands right at the edge of the this building. Until I read his birth and death dates, I didn't realize Hale was only 21 years old when the British shot him for spying during the American Revolutionary War.

Here, we are in the 'green' area of the Old Campus.  These are the oldest buildings at Yale.  In the green area there are statues of past presidents of Yale including one with a shiny shoe.  This is Dwight Woolsey, a 19th century president, and legend says that touching his shoe will bring the student luck.  His statue is all brown bronze, except for the toe of his shoe which is shiny gold.  Just goes to show you, even the smart ones can be superstitious.

The first president, Rector Pierson (1701-1707) started Yale in his house because he couldn't get out of his preaching contract.  The monument to Bart Giamatti, the Yale president of the 1980's is a very uncomfortable looking bench with a great sentiment:  

And that's only the first half...

You can see why this bench warms my heart, but it's still awfully hard on the butt.

"Colleges" (dorms) ring the old campus.  To enter each, you must go through elaborate gates.   Here's a great example of that style.

Below is a close up of the fantastic stone carving that is a hallmark of this campus.  These are just snapshots.  Everywhere you walk, there are more examples of interesting architecture.  The most ornate buildings were built during the "Gilded Age" and feature all the excesses that time period brings to mind.  There are some buildings that are simply tortured with decorations.  

The Sterling Library (main Yale Library) looks 'old', but actually it was built in 1937, and the details over the door were what I found the most interesting.  The represent different cultures who contributed to human knowledge.

Then, if you turn around from this view, suddenly there's a very bauhaus modern type building.  This is the Rare Book Library which is all closed stacks with just a few of it's treasures displayed including a Gutenberg Bible.

There are also many monuments scattered around the Yale campus.  Here's an example of a coordinated building and monument.  The ornate carving of this building frames the 'words' which are a list of the battles of World War I.  In front of this building sits something that looks like a tomb, and commemorates the Yale men who died in World War I.

Finally, the Yale Law School is so over architected, it's almost comical.

It looks like a gothic cathederal complete with stained glass windows.  The music school has a ground level rotunda.  There are buildings with gargoyles carved in the likeness of favorite Yale professors of the 19th century.  It just goes on and on.  These are only the outsides.  Inside is where you find the real treasures...but that's another blog.