We recently visited Montevideo’s National Museum of Natural History, one of the many museums here in Uruguay, all of them small by world standards. The nice thing about small museums is that you don’t need to make a full day of popping into one, and if there is an admission price, it’s not much. (and some are free) Having said that, I love natural history museums and found this one just too small, it left me wanting more, though what there was was very professionally organised and informative.

South America intrigued Charles Darwin who on his visits to this continent experienced and observed plant and animal life plus extinct forms of modern day plants and animals via fossils in the rock layers, all of which he diligently recorded, and which led over several years to him developing his Theory of Natural Selection. He travelled extensively around this continent including time spent in the Falkland Islands, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, The Galapagos Islands, Chile, along the way journeying into the Andes and more. We’re so fortunate to have great documentation of his travels and his experiences like his Voyage of The Beagle and the proceedings and journals of the major scientific associations to which he presented his work.

From Science News “Many of the species Darwin discovered in the fossils were previously unknown to science, including several giant ground sloths, compact car–sized relatives of armadillos called glyptodonts (SN Online: 2/22/16) and ancient kin of horses and elephants. Because many of those animals were apparently extinct — but just as apparently related to species still living in the region — Darwin concluded the fossils were strong evidence for the “transmutation,” or evolution, of species. This evidence was all the more convincing to him, Lister suggests, because he had unearthed the fossils himself. He saw firsthand the fossils’ geologic context, which enabled him to more easily infer how species had changed through time.”

Montevideo’s National Museum of Natural History has this beautiful Glyptodon fossil, complete with an amazing spike-ended tail looking for all the world like a lethal weapon of war, the mace. It was rather disappointing that this magnificent fossil sits in a cluttered space in front of some kind of storage instead of occupying an otherwise empty space without distractions so that it’s magnificence can be appreciated. Some similar fossils have been reported to be as large as cars but up to 8ft tall, and often likened to the VW Beetle. There are several similar fossils at Colonia, and a terrific one at MAPI the Museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art in the Ciudad Viejo, Montevideo.

There was a variety of tail shapes and textures of the hard thick bony carapaces some of which have been assembled here

An interesting nearby area featured birds of Uruguay, their nests and eggs, with an accompanying chart identifying them all and their usual habitats. But I felt that missing from this display was a taxidermist treated model of each one, that might have tied all the species and their habitats together within the national territory of Uruguay.

The museum is housed in a historic building on a large block of land, and I hope there are some plans for expansion of this museum – as institutions of this kind have so much value for the nation and the education of its children.

Square grids and squares themselves represent order and calm, predictability. So the disrupted pattern in each of these ~30cm grid studies reflects my concern at the current state of the world. Since the invasion of Ukraine 18 months ago, we’ve heard much about the “Rules Based Order” concept that motivated and underpinned the world’s recovery following World War II. I myself think the notion of ‘world peace’ is a bit of a myth, as realistically speaking, I doubt there’s ever been a time of absolute peace since the Dawn of Time.

Being a year 1 Baby Boomer, one of my earliest memories of events outside my own family is the morning in June 1952 when Mum announced that the king had died, and Princess Elizabeth had become Queen Elizabeth the second. (it would be a few years before I knew anything about the first) My next memory of a world shaking event was the The Suez Crisis of 1956. My home state of Tasmania has always been known as The Apple Isle, on account of the quantity of high quality apples produced there since first settlment in 1803. When I was a child, huge quantities of them were shipped to UK and Europe during the northern hemisphere off-season for locally grown fresh fruit. In 1956, in response to other events in the Middle East, the Egyptian government suddenly seized control of the Suez Canal. Many ships containing Tasmanian fruit were stuck in the canal for months while their precious cargos just rotted, resulting in a massive economic hit to the Tasmanian apple growing industry. Within a few years the government was paying orchardists to dig up their trees and and plant something else. Fruit is still grown there, and as cider has become more popular apples are still important, but that event forced the diversification of Tasmanian agricutlure, which, in retrospect was probably a good thing.

My childhood was regularly punctuated by other big news stories of regional spats, anti-colonial uprisings, wars and dangerous dictatorships athe MIddle East, Africa, SE Asia and Eastern Europe and South America, much of which was part of, or accompanied by, the long drawn out Cold War between the Communist East and The Capitalist West comprising Europe, N. America and their allies. I was 15 when that idealogical clash rose to that crisis known as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. I clearly remember our parents intently focusing on the scary evening news, and how some fellow students were crying in the playground when I arrived at school one morning. The whole world felt very dangerous for a while – just as it does now, sixty years later.

There’s more to be done on each of these, and I’ll probably make more, as I love making fibreart with grid layouts, but today I just needed to post these ‘studies’ in progress, partly to help my mind consider how motifs in grids are linking up with my feelings about the current state of the world.