The whale skeleton, later reconstructed with wires by Thompson, now resides in a glass display case for all to see at the University of Vermont’s Perkins Geology Museum, one of two campus museums.
The whale and a helpful inscription tell plenty about continental glaciers, changing climates, and evolving sea and land formations. A visitor can’t help but imagine the befuddlement of the laborers when they uncovered the whale, the excitement of Thompson as he pieced together the skeletal puzzle, and more to the point: how dramatically the landscape and flora and fauna of the region have changed over 11,000 years.
Just a five-minute walk away, across busy Colchester Avenue, is the university’s better-known and stately Fleming Museum of Art, a cultural touchstone in Vermont’s largest city. It too has a marquee player from ancient times: a mummy from the 6th century BC. Set out in her own glass display case is the wrapped body of what the museum describes, thanks to X-rays and CAT scans, as “a young slender woman.’’
The caption on the wall of the Fleming’s African and Ancient Egyptian Gallery, where she rests, reports that the mummy body, purchased by the museum’s first curator from the Egyptian Museum of Cairo in 1910, had likely undergone a 70-day embalming process. It involved removing major organs and “packing the body in natron, a salt compound found in Egypt, and wrapping it in hundreds of linear feet of linen before placing it in its decorative wooden case.’’
“It‘s usually the number one thing kids want to see in the museum,’’ says Christina Fearon, curator of education and public programs. “I think the subject of ancient Egypt is fascinating to children. . . . They get so immersed in the pyramids and the gods and goddesses, and mummification, more than anything, seems to intrigue them.’’
