This museum display comparing mammoths, mastodons, and an elephant does everything right. It directly compares, from front to back, a pygmy mammoth, an American mastodon, an African elephant, and a Colombian mammoth so you can see just how big they were. It doesn’t get more intuitive than this.
But what I love about this particular photograph is the addition of the person for scale. If you were seeing this museum display in person, it’d be a moot point. You would be able to gauge the size of the unfamiliar animals, the mastodon and the mammoths, against a fairly familiar elephant. But to maintain the power of this comparison on paper where the animals will be reduced to a couple of inches in length, we need a new cue if we are to maintain the explanatory power of this depiction. Most of us would be hard pressed to recall the exact dimensions of an African elephant. But a person - now that’s a subject we’re a bit more familiar with. Suddenly, with the simple addition of a woman in the frame of the photograph, our contextual clue is restored and the display retains its explanatory power in a new medium.
*BTW, this is the last week to see the Mammoths and Mastodons exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History. It doesn’t get more awe-inspiring than seeing a real mummified baby mammoth in person. Go! Go now!
For those of you who can’t make it, this article has some nice pics: Wooly mammoth on display in Chicago - The News-Herald Life : Breaking news coverage for Northern Ohio
