last day in Iowa City

I spent part of it touring Macbride Hall on the University of Iowa campus, which has a public natural history museum.

It’s a great museum, but I’d last been in there in around 1975. The reason is that during childhood they sent us there on one field trip after another, so that I was partly sick of it and partly felt that I knew what it was all about.

Then the other night my parents mentioned that my cousin likes to go there, and I realized I was well overdue for a visit.

The top floor looks the same as I remember it from 1975: stuffed animals (in the taxidermy sense). The museum is 150 years old and some of the animals may have been bagged in appalling fashion by gentlemen in pith helmets, such as the African animals on display. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating tour of mammals and birds.

The ground floor has more of a teaching museum atmosphere, with helpful exhibits on geology and soil science. This being Iowa, there are explanations of why Iowa has such great topsoil and why we also have the nation’s worst record of losing the most of it in the past century, along with tips on how the erosion can be halted. There are exhibits on the ONEOTA NATIVES of the state (one tribe remains in Tama County, assuming that the Ioways are descendants of the Oneota).

There is also a very impressive model of the giant ground sloths that seem to have lived here until 10,000 or so years ago. Although likely harmless to any humans they encountered (the reverse was surely not true) they were colossal creatures and, in the words of one of the children I overheard there today: “This is the scary part of the museum.” Yes, the giant sloth is large enough to be a bit scary.

But what left the deepest impression on me was the geology section, looking at the vastly different climates of Iowa over the course of time. Iowa had a volcanic period in the Pre-Cambrian Era. In the Devonian, Iowa City was a coral reef (they found spectacular fossils here when the 1993 flood washed away a campground). At another period, Iowa was a swamp filled with huge flying cockroaches. And who knows what it will be at some other point in the future?

It was a powerful reminder of how fleeting everything is– even climates and geological formations, let alone human civilizations.