Observation 3 IR: Models

Nine Images of Models at the Field Museum

Indricotherium is the largest land mammal ever discovered. A fully grown adult weighed up to 20 tons—the weight of three or four adult African elephants, which are the largest land mammals alive today. Indricotherium lived in the forests of central Asia between about 34 and 23 million years ago. It was a plant-eater and could stretch its long neck to nibble leaves high in the treetops. Indricother

ium needed to eat massive amounts of vegetation to survive, and as the central Asian forests gave way to open grassland habitats, this huge mammal species went extinct. Its closest living relative is the rhinoceros.

French artist Elisabeth Daynès at work in her studio, finishing the clay reconstruction of the boy inside mummy #111517. A silicone sculpture was created from a casting of this clay head after CT scans and 3D imaging revealed the contents of this specimen that had been in The Field Museum's collections for more than 100 years.

Meet Retz's Helmet Shrike (Prionops retzii). All species of Helmet Shrikes have these beautifully ornate eye wattles and they occur on both males and females. These shrikes live in tall dry forests of Malawi. They form family groups and forage together through the trees looking for large insects.

Models

What is a model? In the context I am working with, the context of Natural History, a model is an object made by human beings (and therefore not a specimen taken from nature) that is made for the purpose that would be served by a specimen. That is: an object made by man to take the place of a specimen where a specimen does not (or cannot) exist. In most cases, species are shown in natural History Museums by displaying their preserved bodies, parts of their bodies, or fossils of parts of their bodies. Mostly this is done in the form of taxidermy, where the skin of an animal is preserved and placed over a form that mimics the animal in life. Taxidermy mounts are the skins of dead animals made to look like they are alive, something that is achieved with the pose of the figure and realistic glass eyes. Other animals, such as extinct species like the Giant Irish Elk, may be displayed by showing fossils of their skeletons. No acual body part remains, since the bone has since been replaced with stone, but fossils still lack the human hand. The may be excavated, cleaned, and organized by men, but they are not created by them, and are true reflections of the forms of the bones.

Models are not this way. Models are made by human beings as a standin for specimens. Models are often shown in Natural History Museums as if they were actually specimens of species. Often this is done if the species is unavailable, and the model is created as a sort of ‘artist’s recreation’ of what an exinct species most possibly looked like, such as in the case with the Indricoderium. Because this species is extininct, and taxidermy is impossible, the museum has created a life size model to show people what they believe it looked like, based on fossilized evidence and studying it’s closest relative, the rhinoceros. Another similar example is the recreation of the face of the boy inside mummy #111517

 . This recreation was done with the aid of CT scans and 3d imaging of a mummified specimen in the museum collection. Using this technology, the sculptor can recreate with some amount of accuracy, what this person looked like in life. These two examples should show you that there is some amount of accuracy in creating models, but there is always that gap between what something actually looked like and how man recreated it. For example, we deduced that the indricoderium had thick gray skin because of it’s close relation to the rhinoceros, but we do not actually know this, and thus, the model could be inaccurate in color. This applies to all aspects of models that attempt to recreate for display what we cannot see directly.

And just to make this a bit more complicated, I wanted to point out that taxidermy itself is not free from these problems. Take the example of the Helmet Shrike. Although bird skin may be preserved, it will shrink and wrinkle in the drying process. Covered in feathers this is not a problem, but in the case of birds with exposed skin, like the Helmet Shrikes wattle the skin will dry in a way that does not show how it looks in real life. Because of this, if the bird is preserved as a taxidermy mount, the taxidermist would recreate the waddle using clay and paint. This is just one example of the many ways that taxidermy is reliant on the skill and knowledge of the taxidermist in order to be accurate. Many old specimens at the field Museum are not accurate the species (inaccurate body forms, wrongly colored beaks etc) caused either by a less skilled taxidermist or a lack of knowledge at the time of what the animal looked like in life.

-IR