Once or twice a year my husband and I make the trek from our cozy hill-bound street in southwest Virginia to the hubbub of Washington DC, about seven hours northeast. In twenty years of visits, I have never missed a pilgrimage to the Natural History Museum, where I often fantasize about being locked in the dinosaur hall at night, when all’s tomb-quiet and someone forgets to turn off the spotlights, so the huge white bones light up like prehistoric sculpture. Or like a primeval open book. But on the most recent trip, as usual, I was jostled along by hordes of people. All the kids with their digital cameras flocked around Tyrannosaurus rex like paparazzi, gawking at the king of carnivores through their LCD screens. When I finally did get to look at the colossal relic, its toothy grin and dangling paws struck me as sort of funny—like a parody of a dainty thug.

Near T. rex arched the outlandishly fanned back of the stegosaurus. Behind it an immense diplodocus’s ungainly neck terminated in what seemed a proportionally tiny pea of a head. What was evolution thinking? No one will ever know that, but I do know what I was thinking: The Triassic period sure gave us a lot to ogle.

Wandering into the calmer hall of mammals, I paused before a little fossil primate no bigger than my cat. Its long serpentine tail dangled limply, like a bicycle chain, its gangly limbs gripping a branch as if it were perfectly natural for a skeleton to climb a tree. Well, isn’t everything supposed to be natural in a natural history museum? I’d passed this specimen many times on previous visits, but that day Smilodectes gracilis struck me in a peculiar way, for here was an ancestor snugly crouched in a branch of my own family tree. Here was a creature with a bony armature not unlike mine or any of the other hominids shuffling around the room.

All around me men, women, and children peered down to study slabs of crushed bird skeletons or shadowy insects in gray rock—all beautiful despite their smashed-by-a-truck-on-the-asphalt postures. Some people craned their necks up at the Eocene bones of Uintatheres, a clumsy-looking mammal with a head full of bumpy horns. Nine feet tall reared up on its hind legs, the beast impressed me as a Dr. Seuss character in search of a story. If some “intelligent life form” had pointed a telescope toward the earth at the beginning of the Paleocene, would it have predicted that mammals would fair so well when sighting this big-boned klutz?

At that moment, the entire room became an animated display, as viewers, bones, and backdrops of blue-skied dioramas mingled together. What would a wall text say about the living primates in my imagined exhibit? Maybe some plain facts about Homo sapiens—that they stand erect on two legs, that they have huge brains and binocular vision. But how would a curator explain why we humans ramble around exhibit halls peering at displays of animal bones in the first place? What evolutionary motive could be offered for this weird behavior?

Of course, not everyone was studying the fossils. In the shadow of a giant flightless bird, a little boy scratched at his crotch, smiling the sickened way a dog smiles when about to vomit, and whined to his father about wanting a hot dog. In my imaginary exhibit, he’d signify our instinctive side, still umbilically connected to Smilodectes and his rapacious appetite for munching tender leaves. But in the opposite corner, by the armadillo-like glyptodons, a young woman peered down her nose through glasses and earnestly jotted in a notebook; she’d represent our desire to order the natural world meticulously, represented on a grand scale by the myriad labels dotting each diorama that loomed above her curly brown hair. Then the whole museum morphed into an exhibit not of natural history, but of the unnatural history of how we humans reinvent the natural.

At that point, sitting back on my boot heels and balancing a sketchbook on my thigh, I began to draw Smilodectis gracilis. That little prosimian’s amazingly long-boned hand gripped the branch just as I gripped a pen, with fingers pressed against thumb. And what huge eye sockets . . . empty windows once cupping eyes, eyes which peeked out at an ancient world much in the same bifocal way I was staring at him now. And while I sketched, people paused to peer over my shoulder, checking the bones before me and comparing them to my sketch. Some whispered politely (no matter where I sketch, people make the same comments): Do you get money for that? . . . Are you an artist? . . . My uncle’s an artist . . . Do you work here? . . . I wish I could do that . . . That’s cool. But that day most stood silently looking on. A few fetched companions to observe my sketch, pointing and whispering reverently with heads bowed. It was as if I were in the Darwinian Sanctuary of Old Bones and they’d become acolytes assisting my sacred rite.

Perhaps because many need a “human-interest story” to engage with the natural world, those who watch me often become as intrigued by my sketching the bones as by the bones themselves. It seems I’m an intermediary connecting the living onlookers to the bleached scaffolding of extinction. My drawing, for them, becomes part of the display: A living being’s pen translating specimen into line offers a way of entering the alien—and long-gone—realm of a pterodactyl soaring overhead, or the skeletal carcass of a shrew curled womb-like in dark rock. I’ve become a character in the theater of the museum. It’s not important they know who I am, for I’m in the anonymous role of “an artist recording observations,” and that’s something more graspable than fifty-million-year-old bones.

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