a museum of questionable veracity and dubious trustworthiness located in Los Angeles, California. It was founded as an exploration of the language of fact and certainty used by the scientific community, as a ‘cabinet of curiosities writ-large’ by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in 1988.
Located adjacent to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the museum calls itself “an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic”; the relevance of the term “Lower Jurassic” to the museum’s collections is left uncertain and unexplained.
Intended to provoke questions about the very institution of museums, the museum’s collection includes a mixture of artistic, scientific, ethnographic, and historic, as well as some unclassifiable exhibits, and the diversity of its offerings evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 16th-century predecessors of modern natural history museums. The factual claims of many of the museum’s exhibits strain credibility, provoking an array of interpretations from commentators.