Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones

 Bones--everything my biology class is about. Officially titled "Apes and Human Evolution," much of the class is spent looking at old, moldy fossils and ape skeletons. I just wrote a paper comparing gibbon skeletons to human ones.

My professor is a gentleman by the name of Russ Tuttle, and if you are anyone in the anthropology world, you know him. He taught the scientist that found Lucy, for example. And you know those footprints they found in Tanzania that are millions of years old, showing bipedalism (the Laetoli track)? He did all the work, while Mary Leakey handled the media. At one point, I was reading a scientific paper by him for homework while he was sitting behind me in the same room--it felt a little surreal. Anyway, this man knows his stuff. And being in a class of 10 people, we can't hide.

He's got a pretty weird sense of humor. For example, he showed a top-down view of an ape and human torso, with the head removed so you could see the skeleton. He labeled one "Monkey," and the other "Carmelite Nun, circa 1850" (a reference to the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, in case you didn't know).

Every Friday is an excursion to somewhere related to our class. This Friday we went to the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle--the Museum of Natural History. Far from being just a Parisian version of the Field Museum, it contains the second oldest zoo in the world, started by Napoleon. So we spent the morning observing orungatan behavior.

Professor Tuttle is in red

I guess Napoleon was scared of apes

Then we moved on to the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy--a huge hall full of skeletons. I have never seen so many bones in my life. It was also full of screaming Parisian elementary students, who had to be constantly reminded "Ne touche pas!"

Then we moved to the Grande Gallerie de l'Evolution, where I was tickled to see a diorama of animals that looked exactly like a model of Noah's Ark.

The whole excursion was done by noon. After eating lunch in the park outside, my entire class (all 10 of us) walked over to the Isle Saint Louis for Berthillon ice cream.

Regina was trying to look like a pig

The other group was acting normally

Moi avec Berthillon

 Then, one member of the group said, "I'm going to the Catacombs this afternoon, if anyone wants to come."

Now, I had been planning to go to the Catacombs by myself, but now I'm glad I went with five other people. I would have been too freaked out. In around 1795, Paris decided to move the bodies from several cemeteries deep underground and reverently pile up the bones and label them with quotations about death. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but when they say bones, they mean it. There were miles and miles of underground tunnels, all lined with neatly piled bones and skulls. The creepiest part was the winding staircase 60 meters down, and then a long seemingly-never-ending walk before the bones began. It was a little frightening to think about how much earth was above our heads.

The opening to the bones read "Arrete--c'est ici l'empire de la mort" (Stop--here is the empire of death). Indeed, walking those tunnels made all of us contemplate our own mortality.

So I went from bones of all shapes and sizes in the morning to miles of human bones in the afternoon.