It's hard to believe that this book is over fifteen years old at this point. I remember reading it when it was new! It didn't seem that long ago! I ran across a mention of this book a few weeks ago, and ended up tracking down a copy. I'm glad to say that it bears up well for its age.

This is on my short list of non-fiction books that I have purchased repeatedly over the years. Its main subject is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, but its broader focus is the weird and wonderful (and often confusing) nature of life itself.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is many things, and it's difficult to decide which thing it is "mostly." Is it an art installation? A critique or satire of museums? A genuinely bizarre collection of things both real and unreal jumbled all together? Yes. Its Wikipedia entry uses words like "challenging" and "eclectic."

I did a bit of searching and was pleased to find that the Museum of Jurassic Technology is still in full swing. This, despite its tenuous financial standing, even at the time that Weschler published his book. Its financial solvency was no doubt helped in 2001 when the museum's founder, David Wilson, received the MacArthur Genius Grant (which is an award of $500,000 just for being awesome).

Part of the genius of Weschler's book is that it leads you through the various stages I imagine a person goes through when they first encounter the MJT. Incredulity, then credulity, then research, and finally a conclusion.

Incredulity is an understandable first response. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a collection of fringe science subjects and displays, but not on any topics you have ever heard of. One of the items that Weschler mentions several times is the Deprong Mori. Also called the "piercing bat," this is ostensibly a bat which can pierce walls using a sort of x-ray beam. The museum's display shows a little thatched hut, with an arrow swooping through it, which shows the flight of the Deprong Mori through the hut's walls. The museum also has a big slab of lead, inside which is (according to the display) a trapped Deprong Mori.

The Deprong Mori may be the least believable of the exhibits, but others play it closer to the vest. What are we to think of an exhibit about "the nature of memory," a typically crackpot-y theory from a long-forgotten philosopher of the 1800s? Sure, it seems credible enough.

Weschler must have spent months doing the research for this book. What he found was a mish-mash of real things (for example, the bat researcher who ostensibly identified and trapped the Deprong Mori is a real person) and fabrications (there is no Deprong Mori, and the bat researcher had never heard of anything like it).

Weschler's final conclusion is a mixed one. One thing is certain, though: the world is a richer place for having the Museum of Jurassic Technology in it.