Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a museum located at 9341 Venice Boulevard in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California. It was founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson (husband and wife) in 1988.

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. 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. The museum was the subject of a 1995 book by Lawrence Weschler entitled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, which describes in detail many of its exhibits. David Hildebrand Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2001. The museum is mentioned in the novel The Museum of Innocence, by Turkish Nobel-laureate Orhan Pamuk.

The museum contains an unusual collection of exhibits and objects with varying and uncertain degrees of authenticity. New York Times critic Edward Rothstein described it as a "museum about museums", "where the persistent question is: what kind of place is this?"Smithsonian magazine called it "a witty, self-conscious homage to private museums of yore . . . when natural history was only barely charted by science, and museums were closer to Renaissance cabinets of curiosity." In a similar vein, The Economist said the museum "captures a time chronicled in Richard Holmes's recent book The Age of Wonder, when science mingled with poetry in its pursuit of answers to life's mysterious questions."

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