Sorry for writing only in English - I am a bit hectic right now, and being a bilingual writer is too demanding at the moment. But I will come back and put Japanese versions when I find some time, so please stay tuned...
The other day I posted a report on the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, probably the 'official' main attraction of the complex. All those taxidermied animals marching toward the Noah's ark, yes. (OK, enough repeating, huh?) It was impressive for sure, worth visiting, but what you cannot miss is THE OLD natural history museum on the site.
To avoid confusion, they don't put the word evolution in the name of this museum: les Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée (the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy). It feels like a mad professor's lab from the 19th century, and probably it is what it is! A huge hall full of skeletons of all sorts of animals... They are lined up in orders all right - but these are arranged with evolutionary relationships in mind.
Do you wonder why panda is called 'cat bear' in Chinese? They don't look similar at all from outside... Well, you look the skeletons of bears and cats next to each other, and you will see the almost identical bone structures.
Seeing them all in one place, it is really impossible not to think that they are related. By the way, Lamarck, who proposed the inheritance of acquired traits (and thought to be wrong by the majority now), was one of the founding curators of the museum. You can imagine him pondering about evolution looking at all those skeletons...
By the way, here you can find something you can see in old biology museums but not in new ones - curiosity items. There were preserved specimens of mutant cats, etc (like the ones with only one eye)...
I wonder if mutant bones throw off scientists in study of evolution. Like they made a clade for one-eyed cat separately, for example. What is the feathered dinosaur was a mutant!? OK, enough wondering and escaping from work...
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