The Paris Morgue as a tourist trap

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The was a time when the Paris Morgue was an attraction. In 19th century Paris unidentified corpses were brought in from the streets or the river. In an attempt to identify them it was decided to display them in the hope a relative or acquittance would claim them. They were frozen, displayed on angled iron tables, and their clothes displayed. They would be publicly exhibited for three days.

Entry to the viewing area was free, and soon it became a popular destination for the curious. Newspapers would print lurid details of the cadavers, and the more infamous ones (decapitations, mutilation or children) would draw large crowds.

From the article The Paris Morgue: A Gruesome Tourist Attraction in the 19th Century:

The Paris Morgue was open seven days a week from dawn to 6pm and was drawing up to 40,000 visitors a day. Parisians and tourists mingled side by side. It became a family day out at weekends, the respectable mixing with the disreputable, young and old, male and female, small children and workers on their lunch break; all filed past the bodies with unabated curiosity.

The more horrendous or gruesome a death, the longer the queues grew. Decapitated, or limbless bodies, tiny children, only added to the morbid desire to see the bodies up close.

Of course what was undeniably adding to the dubious attraction of seeing dead bodies on display was that it was free to enter.

A glimpse of the Paris Morgue’s interior. The left wall of the entrance hall consisted of a row of windows through which guests could see the “salle d’exposition” where cadavers were laid out on iron tables, their clothes hung from thick iron hooks over their heads. 

Indeed if on a rare day, the morgue was empty of bodies, the dissatisfaction of the crowd was made apparent. Their appetite for death up close had become almost insatiable.

Because of the guarantee of daily crowds, street vendors set up outside the morgue selling oranges, coconut ice or whatever else they thought would tempt the queue.

It all sounds rather macabre and gruesome, but then again, we all slow down and rubberneck for traffic accidents, don't we?  

The Dance of Death

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These are Dance of Death pictures by the 19th century British artist Thomas Rowlandson. The Dance of Death genre, which first appeared in the 15th century as a reaction to the Black Death, featured the figure of Death coming to claim its victims. Sometimes they were a reminder that death comes to us all, but often they were little morality tales about the end waiting for the debauched.

These images, and those after the jump, art taken from Everything Old is New Again's post The English Dance of Death: Thomas Rowlandson’s Scathing Memento Mori 1814-1816. There are more examples there, as well was the captions that accompanied the illustrations.

Thomas Rowlandson

Life and Death in the Late Cretaceous

67 million years ago a snake coiled in a nest of dinosaur eggs and ate the babies as they hatched. A landslide buried the scene and time and conditions fossilized it.
 
The discovery and identification is described in a Wired Science article:

"Geologist Dhanajay Mohabey of the Indian Geological Survey first unearthed the fossil 26 years ago in a rocky, limestone outcropping in the northwestern Indian village of Dholi Dungri. He thought all the bones at the site were those of dinosaur hatchlings.

But in 2001, University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, took a second look at the fossils. The team then recognized they had actually found a snake coiled around a broken egg, with a hatchling and two other eggs nearby."