Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums

How museums display extinct species--and what these exhibits say about us.

While it’s no longer possible to encounter a dodo in the wild, we can still come face-to-face with them in museums. The remains of extinct species--whether taxidermied, skeletal, drawn, or sculpted--stare back at us from display cases.

In this moving meditation on what’s lost and what endures, environmental historian Dolly J rgensen visits natural history collections worldwide--from Shanghai to Philadelphia, from Edinburgh to Hobart, Australia--to understand the many ways that museums tell stories about extinction. She encounters extinct animals that are framed as cultural artifacts and as rare valuables, that are memorialized with lists, and that are brought to life through augmented reality. She draws our attention to creatures with prominent afterlives--passenger pigeons, giant moas, thylacines--as well as those that are less likely to be discussed or displayed. Throughout, J rgensen examines the relationship between museums and the natural world, so readers can look more closely at exhibits about extinction, studying the displays for what is there, as well as what is missing. During a period of rapid species loss driven by humanity’s environmental impact, Ghosts Behind Glass asks what we can learn about our world from the presence of the extinct.

Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging and The Medieval Pig and the coeditor of Sharing Spaces: Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships.