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Statistically speaking, most of the really cool animals have already died. Certainly, almost all of the big ones have. Megatherium, the twelve-foot-tall sloth? Goner. Titanoboa, the snake as heavy as a Honda Civic? Last seen fifty-six million years ago. The cat-size dragonfly, the double-decker-bus-size rhino, the capybara that could dunk a basketball? Expired, departed, no more. A few years ago, a team of scientists launched an effort to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth by altering elephant DNA. Should they? “I’ve gone back and forth,” Ross MacPhee, a paleomammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History, said. “I think my fundamental position is: What’s the point, really?”
The other day, up in the museum’s fifth-floor studio, MacPhee was inspecting a mammoth of his own creation. He is curating an exhibition, “The Secret World of Elephants,” that called for the construction of a life-size mammoth model. (It was sculpted of steel, foam, and polyester resin by two museum preparators, Beck Meah and Jason Broughan.) MacPhee, who has brown-and-silver hair and a matter-of-fact disposition, had come to check on one of the trickiest parts of the installation: the hair. Another preparator, Celeste Carballo, who wore a blue jumpsuit, was applying hairy tufts with a hot-glue gun.
The studio looked like an old shop classroom, with high ceilings, a skylight, and heavy machinery. Drills buzzed. Workers came in and out carrying glass eyeballs. Two dogs barked, unseen. The model was on a rolling platform. So far, Carballo had covered most of the legs, which were about as tall as she was. The mammoth, naked from the midriff up, looked as though he were headed to the pool. Do the models get names? “People always ask us that,” Carballo said. Officially, no. Unofficially, Martin. “As in Martin Gore from Depeche Mode,” Carballo said.
The hair was the centerpiece of their design. “A lot of illustrations of Ice Age mammals make them as dowdy as possible,” MacPhee said. “They say, ‘Since we don’t know, it’s safe to just make them all brown.’ I don’t think that’s realistic.” MacPhee and Carballo wanted more color. Their edgiest decision was to show the mammoth shedding its winter qiviut coat; for some reason, you never see a woolly mammoth depicted with its wool. MacPhee walked over to an inspiration board. He pointed. “This is obviously not a mammoth—this is a musk ox,” he said. “But it’s a good animal. In shedding time, they look like a badly made bed.”
Carballo had found her raw materials at a synthetic-hair company in Massachusetts that did the costumes for “The Grinch,” the 2005 “King Kong,” Chewbacca, and “Where the Wild Things Are.” She held up a thatch, frizzy and tough. “I’m pretty sure we’ve bought hair from them before, for some sort of prehistoric gorilla,” she said.
“Gigantopithecus! ” MacPhee said. “A huge extinct orang.”
Carballo did the dye job herself. “I pretty much spent the summer painting hair, cutting hair, prepping hair, and separating hair,” she said. She’d arranged the shades on carts, a hirsute painter’s palette: Conan orange, Beyoncé ombré, Gosling dirty blond. “I would show them to Ross, and he would help me edit and figure out, like, this tone is right, this is not, this is too Trumpy,” she said.
“The mammoths were not any one color,” MacPhee said. “There was even an indication that some must have been close to blond.”
The legs still looked too neat—a well-made bed. Carballo planned to rub the mammoth with dirt once she’d applied everything. “A little less Pantene,” she said. Then she’d add the qiviut. She inspected a reference photo of musk-ox eyelashes—thick, kinked shafts, like undone paper clips. She had once used broom bristles, while making a featherlike coat for relatives of a T. rex. “There’s no material you can buy that’s ‘dinosaur feathers,’ ” she said. “You have to figure it out.”
Carballo is a painter by training. Years ago, working for a gallery, she assisted on a show of Dieter Roth busts made from chocolate. “Some of my co-workers would eat it,” she said. “I refused to touch it for months. I didn’t want to ruin it for myself.” Her first project at the museum was a diorama of an Aztec marketplace. “I spent a long time painting chayote,” she said. She has since lavished time on other gigantic goners. A megalodon model, from a recent shark exhibit, was so big that she could fit entirely within its jaws.
She applied another tuft, then headed toward her private workspace, in the rafters. On a desk, she had cotton samples that she was matting to replicate the wool. “I just go like this,” she said, stabbing one with a pointy metal object. On another desk was an unusually luscious hair patch. “When Ross told me to look at musk ox, I actually got ahold of real musk ox,” she said. How? “Oh, you know,” she explained. “The Internet helps you find things sometimes.” It felt scratchy. “It sheds,” she said. ♦
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