The Museum of Jurassic Technology

A look through one of the most remarkable and weird little collections on the planet.  The Museum of Jurassic Technology defies categorization and rewards a closer look.

First of all, yes, the Museum is real.  You can go visit them.  You can read up on their history.  There’s even an “About Us” page on their new site with a mission statement:

Although the path has not always been smooth, over the years The Museum of Jurassic Technology has adapted and evolved until today it stands in a unique position among the institutions in the country. Still even today, the Museum preserves something of the flavor of its roots in the early days of the natural history museum—a flavor which has been described as “incongruity born of the overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena.”

The Museum’s site is a mixed bag of the obscure, the bizarre, and the amazing. There’s certainly plenty of titles straight out of a Cultural Theory textbook, like ”Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition”, but it’s also home to less esoteric stuff, like humans with horns.

There is a lot of great, odd and intimate biographical data in the Museum’s exhibits.  From collections of old letters to accounts of love affairs between opera singers and neurologists.  There is also a collection of material on Napoleon, and a study of microscopic sculpture and mosiac art.

The most distinctive part of the Musuem is that this stuff should be boring but somehow it all winds up being quietly fascinating.  Even an article on magician Ricky Jay’s collection of dice winds up being a compulsive read.

One of my favorite pages is a short examination of the lives of African Stink Ants:

On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

Flying Through Solid Objects in Central America

The highlight of the site is the bats, though.  This is the reason I made you read everything else so far.

The claim, see, is that there is a species of bat, known as Deprong Mori, which is also known as the “Piercing Devil”, which can pass through solid matter The theory is that the echolocation system of the bat had evolved into an actual weapon.  As the article explains:

Most species of bats have well developed frequency-modulated “radar” echolocation systems. The key element in such an echolocation system is a sonic beam (actually a high pitched clicking sound) (1.4) which the bat emits and sweeps back and forth to scan its surroundings; the beam is then reflected back from objects to its extremely sensitive ears thereby giving the bat a continually updated “radar” image of its surroundings. (1.2)
Griffith, at the end of the eight month study, put forth what at the time was a rather startling hypothesis reconciling the Dozo’s piercing devil with modern scientific knowledge of the dynamics of echolocation systems.

According to the Griffith hypothesis the Myotis lucifungus has evolved a highly specialized variation of the standard echolocation capability. This tiny bat has developed elaborate nose leaves (1.6) which act as horns to focus the orientation emissions into an extremely sharp and precise beam. Furthermore, the orientation beam of the Myotis lucifugus is not the typical sonic beam, but is emitted as part of the electromagnetic spectrum falling generally in the range of the extreme ultraviolet.

The key idea in Griffith’s hypothesis centered on this variable frequency aspect of echolocation. Griffith reasoned that the Myotis lucifugus employed variable frequency echolocations as do other bats, however the Myotis lucifugus applied variable frequency to its electromagnetic (rather than sonic) emissions. The key idea in the Griffith hypothesis was that as the Myotis lucifugus emission increased in frequency, the emission actually crossed the thresholds from the extreme ultraviolet into the X-ray, thereby allowing the bat to fly unharmed through solid objects.

Griffith reasoned that the Myotis lucifugus, one of the oldest genus of bats (with some 180 million years of evolution at its behest), had evolved this specialized high-frequency emission and the accompanying penetration abilities in response to the density of growth in its rainforest environment.

Obviously, such an animal was not about to be caught in a net, which is why the image up above shows a bat encased in a block of solid lead: that’s how Griffith finally captured the critter.

For now, assume this is a hoax.  In a future post, we will examine the biomechanics of Deprong Mori in detail.