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Bringing fossils to life
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Song Yingwen
EVERYONE has seen photos of fossils in books and on TV, but very few people have actually held one in their hand and marveled at the record of ancient life. When I was a kid, I longed to get my hands on one, to run my fingers over it, perhaps seeing it as the next best thing to travelling through time. However I never expected this dream to come true, especially not in a young city like Shenzhen, until one day I was told that the Shenzhen Fairy Lake Botanic Garden was opening a very special exhibit.
“An ancient extinct life museum will open to the public at the end of March,” Lin Dali, office director of the Shenzhen Fairy Lake Botanic Garden told Shenzhen Daily.
The museum, which will display hundreds of fossils of plants and animals ranging in age from the Devonian Period to the Jurassic Period, will be the first of its kind in China, according to Li Jianjun, deputy director of the Beijing Natural History Museum. He is now in charge of the arrangement of the museum. "There are theme museums in China for certain extinct animals like dinosaurs, but this is the first and the largest comprehensive one," Li said.
Reportedly, the total value of the new museum's collection is over 20 million yuan (US$2.42 million), and among the exhibits, there are dozens of rare and precious fossils.
But the ancient extinct life museum in Shenzhen stands out from similar museums in China not only for its scale and precious exhibits, but also for its innovative design and layout.
The museum will consist of three parts: a "time tunnel" that gives visitors a brief introduction to the evolutionary progress of organisms, the exhibition hall for animal fossils and another hall for plants.
“Since the museum is designed mainly to arouse students' interest in learning more about nature, the exhibits are arranged in a very friendly way to allow kids are entertained while they learn,” Li said.
You won't find old-fashioned rows of glass display cases here. Instead, you will find fossils greeting you everywhere: dinosaur bones embedded staircase walls, dinosaur eggs in the grass under your feet, and skeletons of extinct animals under artificial trees in corridors. They will be so close that you can actually touch them.
Besides the fossils, models will be set to illustrate the origin of life forms.
“Few explanations in words will be found. People will not be given lectures on natural science here. Instead they are encouraged to discover an interest in ancient life,” Li explained.
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