- calendar_today August 10, 2025
Rare exhibits at risk as fire breaks out in MJT
LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology is no stranger to eyebrow-raising and baffling exhibits, but a fire that recently damaged the building may have taken the museum itself in search of enigmas. Late on the night of July 8, the MJT was engulfed by flames, destroying the gift shop and damaging several galleries with smoke. Revenue losses for the museum during the period of forced closure are expected to amount to $75,000. The opening date for next month is not set in stone, but remains a possibility.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology has been a small but beloved fixture of LA’s cultural scene for years. It first opened its doors in 1988 in Culver City, LA. Founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum was from the start a peculiarity of Southern California culture. Although the museum’s promotional literature describes it as an institution “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” there is relatively little connection to that period in prehistory. Rather, the MJT has consistently drawn upon the tradition of wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosity from the Renaissance as inspiration. The museum typically presents visitors with fictional exhibits that are paradoxical, strange, absurd, and yet oddly compelling.
One of the longstanding features of the MJT is its “deadpan, highly self-referential, multilayered, and metatextual” presentation, to quote museum founder David Wilson. The result is a truly unique sense of storytelling where historical truth, fiction, and forgery are all treated with equal weight. For example, one of the permanent galleries in the museum highlights the scientific work of 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher. The Jesuit polymath and alleged “master of a million things” really did leave behind a vast, varied body of work. But it is only one gallery in a whole host of similar ones.
Visitors to the MJT can also explore the practice of creating hyper-detailed sculptures from the smallest possible materials in the work of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian miniaturist whose sculptures are so small they are mounted on the eye of a needle and made from a single human hair. Elsewhere in the museum is the work of a dice-rolling magus named Ricky Jay, whose withered, slowly decomposing cubes are on permanent display in their decomposing containers. Elsewhere is “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” a visual essay of trailer parks in the LA area, and even a collection of love letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1915 to 1935.
Firefight and Aftermath
Journalist and author Lawrence Weschler, whose book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder goes in-depth on the origins of the MJT’s oddities, recently published a longer piece about the aftermath of the fire and recovery process. In it, he relates that the blaze was first noticed by none other than David Wilson himself. The museum founder was alerted by the flames that had appeared in the window of the museum, which stands behind the home where he and his family still live. “He rushed downstairs, two fire extinguishers in hand, only to find, as he later put it, ‘a ferocious column of flame.’ Flames were shooting out from the corner of the building that faces the street and climbing up that corner wall,” writes Weschler.
Wilson was unable to fully douse the flames with the extinguishers that he had brought from his home, but as luck would have it, his daughter and son-in-law arrived only minutes later with a much larger extinguisher. The two were thus able to force the fire to subside just as the local fire department arrived on the scene. Wilson’s luck with the fire was said to have been no fluke. When he later spoke to the firemen who had responded to the emergency call, he was told that the building would have burned to the ground had the fire department arrived only one minute later.
Thankfully, the damage was relatively contained, with the gift shop being fully destroyed and the smoke largely contained to other galleries. Wilson likened the clean-up to “having a thin creamy brown liquid, which had somehow been evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” A process which he said would be slow and tedious, especially since the museum doesn’t have a large budget and was limited to having to clean and repair everything by hand.
Weschler has since encouraged interested parties to send monetary donations to the museum’s general fund to assist with the loss of revenue. With a body of work so close to being lost, such assistance could prove critical in the short- and long-term. According to Weschler, the MJT is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” one that is “inimitable, unique, sui generis.”
While it may be a while yet before the doors reopen, when they do, there will be cause for celebration. With a place like the MJT, it may even be worth asking: what if the fire never happened in the first place?
