I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons with my 3-year-old recently, and the museum’s fossil section has really resonated with me. It’s come at a time when I’m indulging a fascination with evolutionary history (through David Attenborough docos and Wikipedia). In this post I’m going to try to capture what I like so much about it. It’s just a wonderful piece of storytelling.
The first room: early life
As you stand at the start of the fossil section, you do so in position of LUCA: the Last Common Universal Ancestor. Once you’ve finished the collection, you can see the basal branches of the tree of life set out before you. Bacteria, plants, fungus. All the pieces you’d have found around the start of the Cambrian.
In this room, the left-hand-side shows you the invertebrates. A trilobite, representative of some of the most successful animals ever to live, gets pride of place. I loved being able to see Anomolocaris, a Cambrian apex predator. We have a toy Anomolocaris (made by CollectA) in our house, so it was great to help my son make the link to the fossil. The lines on the floor help us see how lineages we recognise today (crustaceans, insects etc) appeared so early in the history of complex life on Earth.
On the right, we see the origin of the vertebrates. We see one lineage through cartilaginous fish, carrying through to modern sharks. And on the other line, the bony fish. One line here goes through to a model representing the ray-finned fish, while the other takes us past Eusthenopteron and Acanthostega: representatives of the lobe-finned fish and our ancestors eventual journey onto land.
The second room: Dimetrodon and Juramaia
This brings us into the huge second room. I love the way the line (tracing from the lobe-finned-fish in the previous room) diverges. On the left, we get the sauropsids including the classics of any museum fossil collection: ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and of course the Dinosaurs. The journey along this line takes us through to the emergence of birds with Archeopterix as you might expect. I’m always a little frustrated that the tree on the floor erroneously has the sauropods diverging before the pterosaurs, but what can you say?
To the right, we’re treated to the two sides of the pre-Cenozoic story of the synapsids: Dimetrodon and Juramaia. The museum doesn’t really emphasise this, but I’m struck by the story told by these two fossils. During the Permian, synapsids like Dimetrodon were the largest land animals. But they lost out after the Permian–Triassic extinction event. The surviving synapsids evolved into tiny mammals like Juramaia, scratching out a nocturnal living while dinosaurs ruled the Jurassic and Cretaceous. As we’ll soon see, the ancestors of creatures like Juramaia eventually reclaim the dominance enjoyed by Dimetrodon.
As we reach the end of the second room, two lineages continue on: the birds (from Archeopterix) and the mammals (from Juramaia). We pass a model of an asteroid striking the earth (the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event) as those two branches pass through the door into the next room.
The final room: Our place in the evolutionary tree
As we step into the final room, the two lines diverge. Through the mammal line we are treated to some classics of the Cenozoic fossil record. Mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and the like. The evolutionary tree fans out across the floor for the mammals here, and right at the end we see the remains of Australopithecus, the first ancestor that only modern humans share. But the evolutionary tree now continues, not just through the fossils, but up to the top level.
Here we find the climax of our story. Silhouettes on the wall, matching those of some of your companions on your Animal Crossing island. The first line from the previous room, representing the dinosaurs, traces through to a bird silhoette. The remainder take us through the mammalian groups. We start with marsupials, since I suppose they’re the most basal. Then different placental groups: elephants, carnivorans, ungulates and rodents.
But as we approach the end, we notice a missing silhouette next to the monkey. If you look down at the evolutionary tree, we see our ancestor Australopithecus is a close relative. And then you take a step into the empty slot. Your character is illuminated. A small, gentle bell rings. You stand there at the end of this incredible story, a human being taking their place in the evolutionary tree. The story is complete.