The docent at the ticket-counter explains that this part of Colorado was, in the Jurassic, an alluvial floodplain-all sand, no rocks to be found. I had hoped they’d let me hold one in my hand. I am disappointed, but I try not to show it. All those millions of years ago, it was too sandy here. He apologizes that they don’t have any specimens in the collection at this time, and that, in fact, none have yet been found in this region. I ask the docent at the ticket-counter, an elderly gentleman, whether the museum has any gastroliths. Upon entering the lobby, I hear a group tour somewhere farther back in the museum, school kids taking turns touching- gently, they are admonished by their chaperones-the replica Tyrannosaurus rex skull, and then flocking off like swallows among the aging dioramas. The cards display the names and approximate ages of each specimen in the ring of stones. And another sign below that says Keep Off the Boulders, because I, and kids, would first be inclined to climb on top of the rocks of the Time Garden installation, rather than read the informational placards stuck to them. There’s also a sign for the Time Garden-an array of geologic samples from the hills around town-with the subtitle Rocks Reveal Lost Worlds printed underneath. There is, for example, a sign that says “FUTURE PALEONTOLOGISTS AT WORK” posted above a toy-bestrewn sandbox. The building itself looks like a faux-timberframe motel, in a non-charming way, and the exhibits that abut the parking lot are clearly geared for kids rather than graduate students. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhumanīefore entering I pause out front to take a few photos. In response to beautiful song precisely because that is what they never do. Stones are poetically imagined as crying out in protest or weeping Back to Issue Thirty-Nine THE STONE THAT SAYS BELIEVE
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