[cheerful music] [music fades] (Emily)
Back in November, I got the chance to visit the Natural History
Museum in Vienna, Austria. I had wanted to go
for a really long time, and I'm glad I did
because it blew my mind! The building was built
between 1871 and 1881 and it opened to
the public in 1889, but the collections themselves
date back to the 1700s, making it one of the oldest natural history
museums in the world. The museum's layout
today is much the same as it was when it opened, which really makes it feel like
you've stepped back in time. Hanging above
the grand staircase is a portrait of
Emperor Francis I by Franz Messmer and
Jakob Kohl in 1773. The emperor is surrounded by the directors
of the imperial collections. The objects around them would become the heart
of the museum today and can still be found
in the museum's archives. The mural overhead by Hans Canon is called the "Circle of Life," but I don't know what kinda
life that dude was living because not a day has mine
ever looked that wild. Way more relatable is
Empress Maria Theresa's taxidermied toy spaniel. It's probably over
250 years old, making it positively ancient
by taxidermy standards, but I've had way more days where I look like that
by the end of 'em. A unique thing about the museum is that they were early adopters of Darwin's evolutionary theory. You can see his influence
around the exhibits, and above the main
hall is a sculpture of an ape holding
a mirror to a boy. The other is holding a copy of
Darwin, "The Descent of Man." There are 38
display halls in the museum, and each one is filled
with natural light and original display cases, which still house
collections material. The mineral halls are
surrounded with murals that depict the quarries
where they were found, and the specimens are organized according to chemical formula
and crystal structures. One of my absolute
favorite displays was all about the geology
of Austria's buildings. They've got more than
35,000 stone examples from local buildings, those across the Austrian
Hungarian Empire, and also decorative rocks
from the Vatican, Egypt, and other historic places. This material is super
useful for architects, stonemasons, and conservators, and by people like me who just love finding
fossils in the floor. There was all this ooh,
ah, shiny stuff too, like a mind-boggling gem
collection amassed by an empress and a stunning meteorite case, which included the
Elbogen meteorite. When it fell around
the year 1400, nobody knew what meteorites were and everyone thought
it was just a count that got cursed by a witch
and turned into a stone. That checks out. Once you leave mineralogy, you enter rock displays
of another kind, fossils! The exhibit follows
the progression of the geologic timeline, which means we should
find right about here, yep, there he is, Dimetrodon, who is not a dinosaur. This fossil bird from China is more than 125
million years old, from right around the
time of the first flowers, and this specimen took more
than 500 hours to prepare. Of course, what's a
natural history museum without an epic dinosaur hall? There is a bunch of
super cool stuff in here, including in 1909 business
guy Andrew Carnegie sent casts of
a Diplodocus skeleton to the 10 most important
museums in the world. It shares its room with this super epic
Allosaurus animatronic that I spent way
too long watching. I also had a big nerd-out moment when I stumbled across
a number of fossils that were collected from
South Dakota where I'm from! Some of these pig-sized mammals were from the
Badlands formations. The Vienna Museum also has
the largest turtle fossil ever discovered. It's always super cool to see that something I'm interested in is fascinating to people on
the other side of the planet. But nothing could
have prepared me for what I was gonna see next. Never in my life
did I actually think that I would get to see
the Venus of Willendorf. This is a figure I learned about in art history more
than 10 years ago, and it is mind-blowing to me that if you are here in Austria, you can see one of
the oldest evidences of art and sculpture
in the world. The date on this is 29,500 and researchers believe that this figure could
be even older than that. Interpretation has changed a lot since it was
initially excavated... What the Venus of Willendorf
actually signified. Was it a motif? Was it a fertility symbol? Was it a pregnant
woman's self-portrait? There are frankly things that
we will never be able to know without written record
or other context. I just think it's
incredible that as a visitor you can come and see the
actual object here yourself. You don't have to
be an archeologist. You don't have to have
a ticket behind the scenes. You can just walk in here and
enjoy one of the most famous and greatest artifacts
of human history. Once we left the
anthropology displays, I was full-on cavorting through the first-floor
zoology exhibits. They're based on 19th century
classification philosophy that puts organisms from
least to most complex, but in this iteration, humans are represented as
the climax of creation, which is a really problematic
and antiquated idea. In the invertebrate halls, I found an impressive
assortment of Blaschka models. These were created
by father-son duo Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka
in the mid to late 1800s. Those two were from a whole
family of glass blowers and they produced
several thousand plant
and animal models, relying on specimens and
illustrations for reference. Vienna also boasts
the largest fish display I have ever seen. It houses more than 40 sharks,
rays, and chimaeras. Fish and sharks don't
get a lot of love, but they were so fantastic! Do you know how many
bones there are in a fish? I mean, you could count 'em, 'cause they have
every one picked out and lined up just
for you to look at. Speaking of cool fish, the Vienna Museum has a few
stunning coelacanths on display. These fish were thought
to have gone extinct more than 250 million years ago
in the Triassic, until ichthyologist
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer found one in a fish market
in South Africa in 1938. They're pretty rare to
find in museums today, but lots of them have models. After fish, it was mammals. The mammal halls have case
after case of taxidermy mounts. One of the oldest
specimens in the world is this Javan rhino, which died on its way
to the Vienna Zoo. It looks much the same as it did when it
was mounted in 1801. Despite its age
and fragile nature, the museum has
come up with new ways to explore its collections, like by creating 3D scans
and models of its objects. You can spin it
around if you want to. Spin the rhino! Speaking of old taxidermy, techniques have changed
a lot over the years, as evidenced by some of the
more eccentric expressions you can see on their faces. But the Vienna Museum
also celebrates a lot of new
taxidermy talent too. Do you see this woodpecker
skeleton behind me? Do you want to know why
it has a red ribbon? It's because it won and placed in the World
Taxidermy Championships. How cool is that? Big fan of the world
Taxidermy Championships! Also, hey, check out,
it's a bunch of pangolins! There are eight species, four from Sub-Saharan Africa and four from South
and Southeast Asia. Pangolins are toothless mammals that use their big claws
to dig up termite mounds and use their extra long
tongues to suck 'em up. They're the world's most
illegally trafficked animal, and also the cutest, which is very unfair. Near the pangolins was this case of giant flightless parrots
called kakapo from New Zealand. In 1995, the kakapo
were so endangered that there are only about
50 left in the wild, so it can be kind of surprising to see cases like these filled
with so many individuals. It was about this
point in the tour where I realized just
how much the bird hall was starting to feel like
those with all of the fossils. Whenever I turned around, I'd see another critically
endangered or extinct bird. This dodo skeleton is one
of the very few that exist. There's the Carolina parakeet, which went extinct in 1939, the passenger pigeon,
extinct in 1914, giant moas from New Zealand. In another century, I'll be curious to see
what else has changed, what organisms have come
back and what's gone forever. Those can be pretty
isolating thoughts, but something reassuring
to me about museums is knowing that I'm
not the only one to have an experience like this. There are so many others
who are just as baffled, concerned, surprised, and delighted by the
natural world as I am, and those were the
reassuring thoughts that carried me out the door and into the delightful holiday
markets around the city. Thanks, Brain Scoop. I'll see you next time. [cheerful music] Accessibility provided by the
U.S. Department of Education. [music fades] It still has brains on it.
