The Dead Zoo: Michael van Leeuwen and his colleague Joline ten Welscher work on a humpback skeleton at the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac DónaillDublin’s antediluvian infrastructure is causing many of us to grow ancient and ossified before our time. But occasionally the city’s reluctance to fully inhabit the 21st century — who needs reliable and affordable mass transit or tall buildings? — throws up an unexpected benefit. For instance, the Dead Zoo.
The Dead Zoo: an elephant ready to be moved from the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Photograph: Paolo Viscardi/National Museum of Ireland But from there it gets slightly bogged down. The particulars of taking down the whales and removing the other exhibits from the first floor are not especially riveting. And the documentary errs in delving too deeply into the minutiae of the process.
But the whales should have been merely an excuse to rhapsodise about the zoo itself, and to fill in some of the blanks. Who established the institution? How is it that it has never been modernised? What about the assertion of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould that this calcified fossil from the 19th century was aWhere it does well is in capturing the sense of the zoo as a haven of eccentricity. The people running it are a colourful bunch.