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 Jørgensen 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, Jørgensen 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.
"“Thought-provoking . . . This meticulous unpacking of curatorial choices conveys the complexity of telling the extinction story even as the number of extinct species rapidly balloons.”" - Publishers Weekly
"“Ghosts Behind Glass is a rich academic text. It finds, proportional to the care and delicacy of Jørgensen’s attention (and as good scholarship tends to), observations that feel unbounded by discipline or subject. It is also a pleasure to read. I found myself, in Jørgensen’s text, more excited inside the natural history museum than I had been in years. I finished the book in New York, and the next day I took myself to the American Museum of Natural History to hunt for ghosts.”" - Newcity
