The Museum of Jurassic Technology Is Los Angeles’s Most Bizarre Attraction

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The first thing to know when you get to the Museum of Jurassic Technology is that you can’t, under any circumstances, use your cell phone. Not to take photos, not to text, not to google the information in the exhibits being presented to you as fact so you can figure out what’s actually true. You just have to make peace with your spidey sense telling you that things are slightly off, and you’re not going to be able to use the internet to find out why. At the Museum of Jurassic Technology, some things will be real and some will not. Not knowing which is which is the entire point.

The next thing you should know is that, after perusing the exhibits, you probably won’t have a better way to describe the museum than you did before you got there. To call the collection “esoteric” would be to vastly understate the bizarre array of curiosities, both real and imagined, that fill its galleries.

Not being able to figure out what the place is about is an unsettling feeling. As you make your way from one exhibit to the next, they get stranger and stranger. Why is there a room filled with paintings of Soviet space dogs? A gallery of moving dioramas of Renaissance and Baroque-era theatrical set designs? Two rooms—two—dedicated to female pioneers of string art?

There are no explanations, but there are clues. That string exhibit, called “Cat’s Cradles and their Venerable Collectors,” honors three women who really did collect (and write books about) string figures: Honor Maude, Kathleen Haddon and Caroline Furness Jayne. Painted on the wall, there’s a quote from Haddon: “we may fairly safely venture the generalization that society kills cat’s cradles.” In short: there’s an exhibit about these women and those complex cat’s cradles because, if there weren’t, all that information would almost certainly be lost to time.

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I’ve been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology twice now, and I’m only just now starting to feel like I’m unlocking its secrets. I feel the same way about the place that I do about Severance’s Perpetuity Wing, the strange museum dedicated to Lumon founder Kier Egan: vaguely perturbed, largely confounded and insatiably curious.

To be fair, that’s the feeling that founder and museum director David Wilson wants you to have. To him, what’s real and what isn’t is immaterial. The place is a museum dedicated to museums themselves, an exploration of what we deem is important to remember, why we self-select which parts of history to preserve, and how we carry it forward into the future.

Microminiature sculpture of Goofy by Hagop Sandaldjian (Photo by Jennifer Bastian)

The place is so fascinating that, in 1995, Lawrence Weschler wrote a book about it, called Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. It was short-listed for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.

Wilson started the Museum of Jurassic Technology in 1984 as a traveling exhibition, and opened its permanent home in Culver City in 1988. Since then, it’s grown to inhabit the entire building; the top floor is an open air aviary and garden, where you can sip a cup of tea while tiny, precious songbirds flit through the air.

When Wilson won a 2001 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” Fellowship for his work, the foundation described the museum as, “a provocative commentary on how we organize and archive cultural artifacts.”

“Through his collection of biological, archaeological, and cultural curiosities in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Wilson blurs the distinctions among museum, mausoleum, and library,” the foundation wrote in his award biography. “His installations question what museums are, mean, and do. Fact and fiction are displayed with equal precision and diligence, and natural history items share space with artifacts of surreal technology. His displays challenge perceptions of what is real and what is not, and demand reinterpretations of our understanding of science, natural history, mythology, and vernacular art forms. Wilson’s work underscores the fragility of our beliefs, and at the same time, highlights the remarkable potential of the human imagination.”

Mouse cures from the exhibit Tell the Bees… Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition

My favorite exhibit in the museum is called “Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition,” which is a collection of folk remedies from different world cultures. Eating mice on toast was once believed to cure bedwetting. Dressing a newborn baby girl in a boy’s shirt, or an infant boy in a girl’s dressing gown, would keep the child from harm and would make them lucky in love later in life. A New Year’s Day blessing: the eldest woman in a household would sprinkle the home’s animals with urine, and then do the same to each family member as they roused from bed that morning.

Reduced to their most basic explanation, folk cures were attempts by people with few other resources to remedy what they could with what they had, and to at least feel like they had a tiny bit of agency over things that happen in life they truly couldn’t control. There are scientific explanations for why some worked, like administering ants’ eggs as an antidote to love; the eggs have a chemical compound that inhibits endorphins, literally stopping people from experiencing euphoric feelings. There are cultural contexts for things that couldn’t possibly really work, like the “telling of the bees.” When a family member dies, a surviving relative must tell the bees of the loss, lest the bees all die with that person.

They couldn’t possibly really work, unless they did. After all, isn’t the maxim that you must tell the bees just another way of ensuring that someone actually goes to the hive and tends to it after its main caretaker passes away?

The museum’s website has a page about this exhibit, but it’s a heavily scientific (maybe?) history of the study of folk remedies and context for why the museum has an exhibit about them at all. Read it if you dare, but fair warning, it might break your brain. If you’re the kind of person who leaves the museum certain you’ll be back, like I do, you might enjoy that feeling, at least a little bit.

Julie Tremaine is an award-winning food and travel writer who’s road tripping—and tasting—her way across the country. Her work appears in outlets like Vulture, Travel + Leisure, CNN Travel and Glamour, and she’s the Disneyland editor for SFGATE, covering California theme parks. Read her work at Travel-Sip-Repeat.com.