I am at the Jardin des Plantes, in the Fifth Arrondissement on the Left Bank of the Seine. Here we find one of the world’s oldest zoos, still officially called a “menagerie,” various greenhouses and rows of brilliant dahlias book-ended by statues of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. We also find the various galleries composing the National Museum of Natural History. These include, not least, the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, a two-floor exhibition hall built in preparation for the 1900 World Fair, where the skeletons and preserved tissues of thousands of animal species are on display: the massive jaws of sperm whales, cross-sections of elephant molars like great petrified mille-feuilles, countless miniature bat skulls under tiny glass domes.
read more The Skeleton Garden – NYTimes.com.
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