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Come Step Through The Looking Glass!

Come Step Through The Looking Glass! image
Parent Issue
Day
26
Month
January
Year
1975
Copyright
Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
OCR Text

Mecca

50,000 school children each year visit the University of Michigan Exhibits Museum. Come and follow Ted Layer, Virginia Morrison and Taura Davis into lost ages and wilderness worlds.

PLENTY TO WONDER ABOUT — For Brian Holloway

Come Step Through The Looking Glass!

JAN  26 19

BY ROBERT CUMMINS

News Staff Reporter

What kid doesn’t envy Alice for stepping through a looking glass into a wonderland?

Or Dorothy (better known as Judy Garland) for riding a cyclone from Kansas to the wonderland land of Oz?

There’s another wonderland (or a whole set of them) right here in Ann Arbor. And kids don’t need a magic mirror and certainly not a cyclone to visit them. In fact, most of the visitors arrive in yellow school buses, which you can see parked daily on Washtenaw near North University. Alongside the U-M Exhibits Museum.

Yes, the museum is a mecca. Some 50,000 children visit it each year from as far away as Saginaw and Bowling Green, Windsor and Lansing. Within its doors they find such wonderlands as the wilderness world, the forests and fields of Michigan, the lost age of dinosaurs — and many more.

Here is one of those yellow buses pulling up now. Piling out are the members of Becky Burk’s second grade class at St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Ann Arbor. Shall we put on our second-grader disguise and find out what kids see and hear on their museum visit?

In the lobby we split into two groups. Fifteen children per guide is quite enough. Guide Steve Qualman, a U-M senior in zoology, takes one group and heads for the dinosaurs. The rest of us follow Ruth Bunner, a senior in natural resources, and begin with wild life, in particular a giant clam whose presence in the lobby gives Ruth an opportunity to tell how pearls are made.

Then we go upstairs. On the third floor we stop before an exhibit labeled Michigan Aquatic Birds.

“All were alive once. Now they are stuffed. Which is the boy duck? Which is the girl? Why are the girls less colorful?” No one is sure. Ruth explains how plain coloring helps hide the female from natural enemies as she hatches eggs and rears her young.

We move on to Owls, Game Birds and Hawks of Michigan.

“Everybody remember: be quiet and stand in a semicircle!” is Ruth’s admonition.

The owl’s eating habits are discussed. Gross. Then Ruth asks why an owl’s head swivels. We learn that because it can’t roll its eyes it must swivel its head to see behind it.

“When are we gonna get to the bats?” a voice cries out impatiently.

It turns out the bats are next. Their radar-like navigation system is explained. “They can even use it to catch bugs,” says Ruth.

“Be quiet! Stand in a semicircle!” she repeats as we reach the rabbit display. She tells how and why their fur changes color with the seasons.

“What do skunks do?” she asks as we reach the next display. Everyone knows the answer to that one: “They stink!” We learn the whys and wherefores of their offensive behavior, and that of porcupines, too.

Ruth reassures a child that Venus’s-flytrap doesn’t eat fingers. We see a Michigan woodland diorama, more owls, then a goldfish — a big one.

Why is it so big? “A goldfish wants lots of room. When he’s in a bowl, he stays small; when he’s in a lake, he grows big.” Wolves. Would a wolf eat or attack you? No. And neither would a grizzly bear. A lot of TV shows have been wrong about that.

“C’mon!” Ruth calls out, and we move on to a pond diorama with frogs, turtles, crayfish, tadpoles. Then on to extinct animals — the grayling, passenger pigeon and mute swan — and animals threatened with extinction.

“What happened to them?” Ruth asks.

“You guys killed them off!” someone says accusingly.

“I didn’t kill them!” she replies indignantly.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE?—From left, Charlie Boomus, Luis Cago, Virginia Morrison, Joel Niska, Ted Layer, Karin Asplund

Now is our turn for the dinosaurs and their associates. But first a pause before some fossils and an explanation of what they are.

We stop at a diorama of underwater life in the Ordovician era 450 million years ago.

“Stand back! Stand back! Form a semicircle!”

Evolutionary changes are discussed. And if you step on a metal plate in front of this display case, the tentacles and antennae of the ancient marine animals move. It’s a popular display.

As we view the remains of an ancient fish found in Cleveland, we learn how the ocean once covered parts of mid-America. Then we learn how a shark can replace its teeth.

We come to a dinosaur. “Is this tyrannus rex?” a child asks eagerly. “No, it’s another rex,” Ruth tells her.

We move among the dinosaurs, learning about their long tails, their scales, their different teeth, the great bulk of some of them.

“There were 30 million years between the end of the dinosaurs and the appearance of man,” Ruth says. “Movies showing them fighting each other just aren’t true.” TV gets its comeuppance again.

Next we stand before the re-creation of a moa bird.

“What’s the difference between them and a robin?” asks Ruth. "The robin doesn’t have a real big nose,” replies a girl. True enough, but also the moa birds lacked wings. They didn’t fly and were easy victims when settlers came to New Zealand and caught and killed them.

“C'mon!” And we charge down the spiral stairway to the lobby. The tour is over.

Ruth bids Becky Burk’s second-graders a goodbye and skips upstairs to take a brief break, for already another group of kids in mufflers and knit caps and parkas is coming through the door. Or through the “looking glass,” if you prefer.

Photos

By

Jack Stubbs

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