I am overwhelmed. This thread began with an innocent question about the meaning of "leg." on labels, and has turned into a historico-philosophical treatise on museum exhibits. A most stimulating conversation among friends! Charles Sturm is right: Moderation is called for. It is boring to have only one kind of exhibit, even if it is a very good exhibit. Why see museums when you travel, if they are just like the one you have at home? Exhibits are best when they are unique. Rare specimens, unusual items, complete collections, or material presented in unusual ways: These are worth traveling to see. Here are some of the exhibits that spring to mind from the thousands that I have seen, mostly in the last ten years. All are in the United States. If they emphasize one small corner of the U.S., that is because I do a lot of traveling there for work and pleasure. Draw from this list what you may. Thatcheria mirabilis: One of many shells on display at the Delaware Museum of Natural History (Wilmington, Delaware) when I was a teenager. I had known the snail only in photos, and I wanted to see a real one. Here it was, along with hundreds of others that I no longer remember. It was worth the wait. The tracks of two dinosaurs: a sauropod (herbivore) being followed (stalked?) by a theropod (carnivore), in limestone at the American Museum of Natural History (New York). With a mounted skeleton of a theropod shown "eating" from the spine of a sauropod on the ground. Huge, long teeth. Deliciously gruesome! The chalk sketches of dinosaurs on the wall, high above the floor in the same dinosaur hall. I later learned that the artist had originally intended the sketches only as a guideline for a mural, but the sketches were so good that the exhibitors decided to leave them as they were. The cave at the Anniston Museum of Natural History (Anniston, Alabama). It's plastic, but the water drips and it looks like the real thing. The placards are all at the entrance, so you can read as much or as little about the cave before you enter. There are no labels inside; visitors are left to their own thoughts. This is a very effective modern exhibit. Tools. Hundreds of tools at the Appalachian Museum in Norris, Tennessee, all close enough to touch and none behind glass. You can see every detail. Most museums would show one example of, say, a handmade hammer and leave it at that. This one displays twenty or thirty hammers, no two quite alike, to show what it really means for hammers to be handmade, not mass-manufactured. In fact, the museum consists of a whole village of buildings that have been brought here as exhibits in themselves. Dinosaur National Monument, on the Utah-Colorado border. The rock with its many dinosaur skeletons is housed in a glass enclosure, and you can watch the technicians cleaning the bones on the rock face. A set of extinct birds at the Anniston Museum. Only a photo for the dodo, of course, but the others are represented by actual stuffed birds: incredibly rare today. An underwater scene from the Eocene, at the Florida Museum of Natural History (Gainesville, Florida). Really a huge diorama in which the lighting shifts to simulate the wave-refracted sunlight overhead. And the exhibit of reconstructed animals, seagrass, etc. is backed up by actual fossils. An assortment of tools and teeth at the Red Mountain Museum (Birmingham, Alabama), showing how different kinds of teeth act as tools do. This is another "modern" exhibit designed for children. Like other exhibits at this museum, this one appeals about equally well to adults. Winnie McGlamery's boots, pants, and field notes under glass at the Alabama Museum of Natural History. This one means a lot to me, and not much to anyone else, because she was curator of paleontology from the 30's to early 60's for the collection I now serve. I never met her. McGlamery's clothes are those of a small woman. The trousers are riding pants: practical clothes for a woman doing field work in the 30's in rural Alabama. She had spunk. The field notes are the key to the localities of thousands of specimens in the Survey's collection, and they were lost for thirty years, until I rediscovered them on display in the museum next door. The Clarke County Museum (Grove Hill, Alabama) has a big relief map of Clarke County, showing how the roads hug the ridgecrests. I am certain that this is the only relief model of Clarke County in existence. It is one of the most fossiliferous areas in Alabama, and includes the famous Little Stave Creek. Even a small, local museum can have a unique and appropriate exhibit. The gold exhibit, viewed through thick glass set just inside the door of a big safe in the library of the Colorado School of Mines (Golden, Colorado). Nuggets and wires and sheets of gold, all in their natural forms from mines that no longer exist. A replica of the first motorcycle at the visitor's center at the Mercede s-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The seat was a curved piece of leather over the engine. Talk about a hot seat! The Great Seal of the United States, rendered in fossil shark teeth, at the Fisk Museum in Oakley, Kansas. Some people just have too much time on their hands! This museum also displays, indoors, a complete sod house from the pioneer days. And <shudder> real crinoids ("sea lilies") painted in garish colors to look more like flowers. This museum is such a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly that it is a "must-see" for anyone traveling on the interstate highway east of Denver, Colorado. A room crammed with Cretaceous crinoids, fish, and marine reptiles at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, Kansas. Stunning fossils: Sternberg excavated and prepared fossils from Kansas and sold them to museums all over the world, but he kept the best for Kansas. And every label faithfully displays the name of the landowner who donated the fossil, even after fifty and more years. The circular tank in the Steinhart Aquarium (San Francisco, California). The exhibitors wanted to show live fish from the California Current, but the fish require a constant current to live. The answer? A big, circular tank with a hollow interior where the visitors stand surrounded by fish. The silvery fish swim into the current, around and around, as the visitor gets dizzy watching them. Only the sharks move against the current. A formal herbal garden at the Cloisters in New York, done in the medieval manner. And the Unicorn tapestries inside. The Mona Lisa. We stood in line at the Metropolitan Museum (New York) for two hours for this travelling exhibit, and were allowed to gaze at her for eight seconds from a distance. I won't ever forget my disappointment. King Tut's mask. We stood in line for NINE hours outside the Delgado Museum in New Orleans to see the objects from his tomb, including the golden mask (which made the crowded people literally gasp). I was fascinated by Egyptian art as a child, and here was the best of it, not just one piece, but tens of them. Worth the wait. But I see that I have gone on at length most immoderately. Before I leave Conch-L for the night, a request to Conchland. I have never been to a shell show, but one us has stated that some of the best exhibits are put together for them. Can you tell us about some of your favorite exhibits at shell shows? Andrew K. Rindsberg Geological Survey of Alabama