No, he’s not like that. He told me he was going to tell the kids and see what they wanted to do. He told me later that when he told them it wasn’t the real Sue, they said they’d rather go to the zoo that day, instead.
The advertising led you to believe it was the real thing. IIRC, the commercials I saw showed animation of Sue’s life and then showed her bones fossilizing in the ground, and then on display in a museum. “Come see Sue!”
Secondly, just because one is a curator doesn’t mean you’re familiar with the practices of every type of museum. We’re a general history museum, but we do have fossils (nothing as big an elaborate as a dino skeleton.) Whenever we want to do a display of something out of our realm of experience, we call in teams from other museums who teach us about how things are done.
Well, I’m relieved to read that. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose; as I said, my nephews and their classmates would almost certainly never turn down a chance to see dinosaur skeletal mounts, replicas or otherwise.
They’re the kids of a curator. (Their mom is also in the museum field-- a living history museum director.) They grew up in museums, and aren’t going to be easily impressed.
IIRC, when I returned to the AMNH last year, for the first time in a decade, the bones had associated schematics of the skeletons showing which bones were original and which were casts. In fact, the whole dinosaur room (and other places) were quite fanatical about not misleading anyone about anything. The even revised the horse exhibit to show how the real development was a bush of ancient horses, not the straight line evolution shown in the old exhibit.
