scrolls + skulls + bat cave, oh my!

On Friday, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. It was housed in the basement level, and this is what is hung over the entrance as you descend the stairs:


A wide display of antlered skulls (and the odd narwhal tusk, way in the back). Creepy, no?

(And no, this had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, although I enjoyed it a lot more. Did anyone else find the exhibit extremely Judeo-Christian? I realise that the scrolls have significance in early Christianity as well as not-so-early Judaism, but there's no call to keep quoting John all the time. Or locating Sapphoris with geographic reference to Nazareth. For example.)

I had been to the ROM a year or two ago, after the Crystal had "officially" opened but before it had been populated, so after the scrolls we went wandering up to the dinosaurs.


They hid the T-Rex and other late Cretaceous dinos away from the other dinosaurs in the more open part of the Crystal. It was like they didn't want the obligatory "GRRRR!" picture. (But of course, we took one anyway.)

Of the four of us, I was the only one who had seen the Crystal before, but the others matched my sense of underwhelm. It's not just that we had all loved the old museum (although we did); it's just that there was so much potential that was wasted there. The AGO has shown that it's possible to retrofit modern architecture onto an existing structure (in Toronto, no less), and not suck — so why not the ROM?

I think it is never a good thing when the architect misses the point.