Scratch-n-Sniff

Over the weekend my mother and I went to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Lucy exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. At the Lucy exhibit I picked up the book The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans by Chris Beard. Now, as the title suggestions, is all about the search for Eosimias (dawn monkey in Latin or Greek) and given my simian obsession is a must-read. Then I stumbled across this quote:

While such a predilection is common among lemurs, the dominance of visual pornographic media, rather than scratch-and-sniff cards, demonstrates that the same pattern does not hold among at least some anthropoids.

How often do you get to read about monkeys and scratch-and-sniff porn in a book where it is not pretending to be science but actually is science? Not often enough, me thinks, not often enough by far.

(BTW. You should go and check out the Lucy exhibit before it leaves town April 27th. It is well worth the money.)