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The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a small Los Angeles museum in the tradition of a late Renaissance Wunderkammern. We were alerted to it’s existence having recently read a book about this obscure institution (Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler), but being no where near Los Angeles to visit the place in person, we decided to use this newfangled Internet for a deskchair tour.

Museums as we now know grew out of the personal collections of wonder inducing stuff that men of affluence collected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were typically a hodgepodge of art, technology, and natural items — all seen as facets of God’s wonderful creation. The MJT is such a collection, and imitates those wonder cabinets not just in scope but also in lack of fact checking. Truths, half-truths, fictions, and simply art all there to serve as an inspiration of wonder.