South Dakota
AA-2026-0A6283
On the image
Someone stood in front of the glass case with a flash camera and did what everyone did with a flash camera in the 1960s: fired it straight on, confident that more light automatically meant a better record. The typed card beside the specimen gives a common name and a Latin binomial and a South Dakota locality, the kind of earnest identification labelling that roadside natural history museums used to reassure tourists that the bones on display were educational rather than merely gruesome.
The flash bounced off the case glass and landed dead centre on the jaw, erasing exactly the part of the specimen a curator would have wanted seen. What survives is less a photograph of a skull than a photograph of a photographer's unshakeable faith that pointing a flash at glass was a sound plan, a faith shared by an entire generation of family holidaymakers armed with Instamatics.
The horn, the socket, and the long curve of bone are all still there, visible around the edges of the burn like evidence circling an alibi. The picture that survives says more about how 1960s tourists photographed museum exhibits than about the animal the exhibit was actually trying to teach anyone about.
The historian's note
Small roadside and regional natural history museums proliferated across the American West at midcentury, often built around private fossil, bone, or taxidermy collections and aimed at highway travellers rather than research scientists. South Dakota, with its Badlands fossil beds and Black Hills tourist corridor, supported a number of these institutions through the 1950s and 1960s, typically staffed by amateur naturalists and funded by admission fees rather than academic institutions.
Specimens in such collections were commonly displayed behind glass with a typed card giving a common name, a scientific name, and a collection locality, following a simplified version of institutional museum labelling practice. These cards were meant to lend the display scientific credibility for a lay audience passing through on family trips.
The object shown is a mounted skull specimen with its accompanying identification card, photographed inside such a display case. The specific institution and exact species cannot be confirmed from the available evidence.
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Skull Specimen and ID Card, South Dakota Roadside Museum, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-0A6283. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/skull-specimen-and-id-card-south-dakota-roadside-museum-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20260A6283,
title = {Skull Specimen and ID Card, South Dakota Roadside Museum, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-0A6283},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/skull-specimen-and-id-card-south-dakota-roadside-museum-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Skull Specimen and ID Card, South Dakota Roadside Museum, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-0A6283 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/skull-specimen-and-id-card-south-dakota-roadside-museum-1960s ER -
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