Dino Dubbelgangers at Natuurmuseum Fryslân

As the train rushes trough the flat landscape, as the towns and villages become fewer and farther between and as the forests of the Veluwe give way to the lakes and fields of the North, I feel strengthened. I’ve lived centrally in the Netherlands for years, but my inner compass still points due North. It’s always worth coming out all this way.

There’s always some dinosaur exhibition going on somewhere. Three years ago, it was Denekamp; last year, it was Vlaardingen. Now, it is the turn of Natuurmuseum Fryslân in distant Leeuwarden, giving me the excuse to go out to the lovely North and visit a museum I’ve never been. And what a lovely day it was, sunny but quiet. Our museum is housed in this charming 17th century former orphanage.

Through the entry gift shop we go, into this covered courtyard. It’s hot here in the summer. Nevertheless, coffee and tea are complimentary, so I my excellent mood continues.

Here is the event that caught my attention: “Dino Dubbelgangers”. As you might have guessed, it means “Dino Doppelgängers”, and the premise of the exhibition is that it compares extinct dinosaurs to their living analogues.

A Mesozoic dinosaur looks into the mirror and sees a Holocene animal that, more or less, fills the same niche. In this case, Thescelosaurus recognizes itself in the roe deer… or is it the other way around? They are both smallish herbivores in an environment with plenty of bigger things around, poised to flee from danger rather than fight. I will share my thoughts about the premise of this exhibition later… but lets first admire the lovely minimalist design of the exhibit here, the well-lit animals against the simple black backdrop and the mirror providing a clear and striking image that communicates the intent very well.

The reconstructed Thescelosaurus skeleton is considered the highlight of the exhibition. It is not a particularly big dinosaur, but it’s still larger than a human and quite fascinating in its own right. It’s a Late Cretaceous ornithischian found in the Hell Creek formation, together with staple dinosaurs such as T. rex and Triceratops. Its long tail and atypical, elongated, slightly squashed snout with large eye sockets are very striking and elegant. Alive, I bet it would have been cute.

More of the same idea, but at a smaller scale. A dinosaur is compared to a modern animal, with the mirror separating them. In the rest of the cases, the dinosaurs themselves are represented by figurines. Toys at museums! I can’t escape them! There are no more dinosaur mounts, but at least there is some fossil material present for each featured dinosaur – most often a tooth. Majungasaurus here is being compared to a lion. It’s speculated on the sign that majungasaurs might have hunted in packs – though the sign plays down any certainty we have over dinosaur behaviour, which is proper. Note how the signs are bilingual – in Dutch and Frisian, that is!

Inevitably, Spinosaurus is compared to a crocodile. The visualizing figurine is an Ibrahim-inspired swimmer, but the sign is very quick to point out that there’s lots of uncertainty and debate around the life appearance of Spinosaurus. This exhibition is put together by conservator and palaeontologist Dennis Voeten, and he clearly knows his stuff. I have no idea if the spinosaur snout on display is genuine.

Comparing T. rex to a hyena makes a lot of sense. Fortunately, nobody is playing the tired old “hunter or scavenger?” game – the text notes that hyenas do both, and so probably did Sexy Rexy. The comparison is made because of both animals’ penchant for chewing bones. I’m sure Marc will tell us in the comments what all these figurines are.

Oh dear, we have A Take. Nanotyrannus is presented separately from T. rex! Oh the controversy! The sign, again, brings nuance to the table. It notes that, whether or not Nano is actually a juvenile T. rex, it certainly had a different diet and filled a different niche, and that’s what we’re really interested in. Unlike a hyena, a lynx does not bite through bones, but rather strips them. I don’t know if this is also the case for nano/teen rex (delete as appropriate). Nuance on the sign is all well and good, but not everyone’s going to read the sign… The tooth on display is absolutely tiny. Adult T. rex teeth are, need I remind you, as big as bananananas!

Ouranosaurus is a cow.

A bigger set piece then: Triceratops compared to an elephant! I’m very glad they didn’t go with a rhino. Only last week did I see a Dutch news broadcaster call a Triceratops a “prehistoric rhinoceros“, so us science communicators still have so much work to do… Triceratops is as big as an elephant and twice as long, so it’s at least as appropriate. Other than this, and both animals using pointy bits for interspecific combat, the relationship between the two animals is a bit far-fetched, and the sign needs to reach to find points of comparison.

The elephant skeleton is real, and gives the exhibition something spectacular to look at. The Triceratops is just a life-sized cutout on the wall, but its sheer size still makes it quite impressive. A full Triceratops mount was present at the Leeuwarden library during the summer, but no longer – it will be part of an upcoming exhibition in Naturalis. So here’s a small-scale replica of a Triceratops skull instead.

Naturalis has also provided the museum with a couple of real Triceratops bones to show off, though it isn’t clear to me which ones. They have shelves and shelves of Triceratops material at Naturalis, and they’ve only just finished prep work on all of it. But we’ll get to that some other day.

And that, more or less, is it for the Dino Dubbelgangers. It’s certainly not a very big exhibition, nor are there many especially spectacular items on display – no Big Al here. But I think the museum has used what it has been given to maximum effect. With limited space and budget, Dennis Voeten and the people of Natuurmuseum Fryslân have succeeded in creating a well thought out and good-looking exhibition. There is a very clear premise, followed all the way through, that allows the casual visitor to come away with good new knowledge about the creatures of the past. The signage is top notch.

If I have any criticism, it is this: comparing dinosaurs to modern day animals this way remains very imperfect. Not only are dinosaurs very different from mammals, mesozoic ecosystems are considerably different from holocene ones, especially with our nature in such dramatic decline. It’s very likely that many dinosaurs were doing things that really have no satisfactory analogue in the modern world. One of the things that make dinosaurs so endlessly fascinating is all the ways in which they are unlike any animal we are familiar with.

On the other hand, there is certainly something to be said for removing dinosaurs from their status as “super-monsters” and bringing them to level with our familiar animals. It remains necessary to remind everyone that dinosaurs are just that – animals. It is the antidote to Jurassic World and the neverending monsterization, which is still overwhelmingly the dominant narrative in pop culture where dinosaurs are concerned. Turning dinosaurs into the deer, cows, hyenas and lynxes of their day demystifies them, makes them part of a real nature rather than something out of science fiction. To the young imagination, it just serves to make dinosaurs that more real. So, ultimately, the Dino Dubbelgangers exhibition gets my approval.

And if you compare this modest, small budget exhibition to the rather more ropey affair last year in Vlaardingen, Natuurmuseum Fryslân is here to show us how to make much better use of limited resources.

Let’s explore the rest of the museum for a bit, then. I’m not going to show you everything, as this place turned out to be quite big! Here’s a small permanent exhibition on geese!

The whale hall in particular was rather spectacular. There were at least ten fully mounted whale skeletons, mostly toothed whales and dolphins. There was an orca, a narwhal, a small rorqual and a huge sperm whale as its centerpiece. The hall itself was made extra atmospheric with the windows coloured blue and all kinds of whaling paraphernalia along the walls, along with some taxidermied seals.

I’d like to draw your attention to the blue whale jaws on the floor, surrounding the sperm whale. The jaws themselves are half the size of the entire sperm whale. It is almost impossible to comprehend how big blue whales are. A great exhibition.

Equally as spectacular is this wondrous travel cabinet hall. You know how much we love an old fashioned museum with wooden cabinets here. That said, this all looks slightly too neat to be authentic. The distribution of taxidermy is too tasteful, the curtains too frilly, the furniture too classy. This is a room themed to an old travel cabinet; there’s even some lore about a fictionalized version of a Frisian explorer, Kapitein Severein. We even get to meet him in a bespoke pre-show! Don’t get me wrong: I loved walking around here as I was doing it. Looking back now though, I’m wondering… Are we entering kitsch territory here?

Rather than an authentic old-fashioned museum hall, here we have a thoroughly modern museum hall themed to an old-fashioned one. Museums are learning from theme parks, and I’m not sure if it’s always the right lessons. Instead of an authentic museum experience, we are getting a hyperreal, fabricated, idealized version. In this country, every day out ultimately wants to become the Efteling. Layers upon layers of kayfabe. Is that better or worse than a museum truly untouched by time? I don’t know, but it’s good to be aware of the difference. I will let these thoughts percolate… Anyway here’s some awesome old scientific illustrations of sharks and eels to distract me.

Lots of beautiful taxidermy.

Here’s another cool thing. This room was all about animal teeth and their form and function, so what is the room themed to? A dentist’s office, of course! You can even take a seat in the dentist’s chair and do a little tooth-themed quiz on that monitor screen! A ding for every right answer, and an electric shock for a wrong one. Maybe, I don’t know, I had them all correct.

On the very top floor, a room is styled to “Darwin’s attic”. We have to imagine Darwin sitting here, obsessively logging the differences between individual insects, developing his hypotheses and drafting On The Origin Of Species. It’s another heavily thought-out room, positively breathing atmosphere. There’s stuffed birds on every ceiling beam, animals, cabinets, bones and illustrations everywhere. This is what the science of natural history looks, feels and smells like. Of course, the workroom of the actual Charles Darwin probably never looked like this, but that isn’t the point. It’s about capturing the soul of natural history in its distilled form.

I also appreciate how unflinchingly the museum tackles and explains evolution, a subject that some other Dutch museums are suspiciously mum about… whatever concern they have about angering certain groups, it is no concern here. The whiteboard takes the polar bear as an example, and explains how it may have evolved from the brown bear.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Efteling was on my mind, because the biggest surprise of this museum was in the basements, where (at a reasonable upcharge) there is an actual, honest-to-Vader-Laaf dark ride to experience! Styled as an underwater safari, you board a little trackless vehicle that takes you on an underwater tour through ponds and rivers, surrounded by fish, diving birds and sunk things, boats overhead. Then you pass a sluice door and enter the sea. The whole experience is around ten minutes long, and at this point I have completely forgiven this museum for wanting to be a theme park. It’s done so well! It completely fits in with the premise and themes of this museum. And it’s obviously a love letter to the local nature of Frisia.

I’m usually very critical about the themeparkification of Dutch museums, but, honestly, I had a blast at Natuurmuseum Fryslân. Maybe some of it is kitschy, but it has succeeded in capturing something of the very essence of natural history, the texture of it. Wooden cabinets, whale skeletons, musty attics and taxidermy. Birds and fish and bugs and ammonites. And dinosaurs, of course. It’s captured the love of nature, the delight in finding out how our planet works, the amazement that comes with exploring the living world. Another thing it has captured: my heart. I’d love to come back here some day. The North isn’t rid of me yet.

The Dino Dubbelgangers exhibition can be seen at Natuurmuseum Fryslân until January 5 2025.