Following a long renovation, the Burke Museum re-opened its doors earlier this month with a host of new features and exhibits. The beloved natural history and anthropology museum thrilled visitors with its fabulous upgrades, but one addition left visitors unsettled: The brand new ‘5 to 10 Years, Tops’ exhibit, containing the skeletons of a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and a pug.
“Look, while the current state of endangered wildlife is not really my field, I have it on good authority that we got like, 5 to 10 years at the most with these animals,” said Laurie Childress, a curator for the Burke Museum. “Might as well get ahead of the competition. I have some friends in wildlife research that I meet up with on board-game night, and what I’ve been hearing is that if you like your giraffes with the skin on, get to a zoo sooner rather than later.”
While the alarming message behind the exhibit concerned some, others were thrilled to witness a fresh batch of soon-to-be-extinct animal skeletons.
“We were getting bored of the same old extinct species all the time,” said Fred Jones, a local father visiting the Burke Museum with his children. “’Oh look, another mammoth’—real original. I know, I know: The likelihood of the specimen not only being preserved in the hyper-specific conditions required for fossilization, but also being discovered and unearthed intact is a statistical anomaly. But, come on. If you’ve seen one towering one-of-a-kind fossil, you’ve seen them all. Let’s get some fresh bones in here! Now where’s that pug skeleton?”
The exhibit suggested that pugs were not expected to beat the 5-10 year estimate due to the labored nature of their existence and general apathy towards life due to the daily pain their inbred species suffers through no fault of their own.
“Mankind just kind of bred inevitable extinction into those shmoosh-faced, little guys,” Childress said. “We’re a marvelous little species ourselves, aren’t we?”
