Photo courtesy Science Museum of Virginia
Your skin is crawling. Tiny spider-like critters called mites nestle in the hair follicles on your face and feast on the oil secreted as protection against your skin drying out. While you sleep, they come out and mate. These microscopic hitchhikers started riding around on us about 200,000 years ago, and now everybody carries nations of these mites.
This is but one tiny component of the sprawling exhibition “Skin: Living Armor, Evolving Identity,” which is at the Science Museum of Virginia through January 2023.
Suitable for kids and adults, the presentation escorts visitors through the layers of skin to see how animals and humans have adapted over time. With this exhibit, you will feel all the feels, including putting your hand on a patch of sea otter fur, which is the thickest of any mammal, with a million hairs per square inch.
Skin is the body’s largest organ, and one of its busiest. Accounting for 15% of our body weight, skin protects and hosts life. In a single square inch of our skin, there are 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels, 60,000 pigment-producing cells and 1,000 nerve endings.
The exhibit explores its subject through explanations of the way skin manufactures itself; the adaptations of hair and horns, quills and feathers; the 150 species of fungi that live on your feet; and the use of skin color as a rationalization for political oppression and social marginalization.
Our ancestors of the deep past sported fur pelts until we shed them, like tossing off those big 1920s raccoon coats. The skin then adapted for protection against the sun’s ultraviolet light. Fact is, all our skin is a blend of brown and black eumelanins and reddish-yellow pheomelanins, with the availability of nutrients also playing a role in determining the color of our skin. These differences have led to some of humanity’s darkest history, from the 17th-century Spanish colonization of North America and Central and South America to more than 200 years of slavery in the United States to South African apartheid. There are more examples than can fit in any museum survey.
The Science Museum exhibition, in a quiet way, introduces the disturbing thought that our skin, which whatever its color is the same for nearly everyone, also supports a self-loathing. Denying the basic humanity of one set of people ultimately denies the humanity of us all, and such thinking often causes enduring detrimental consequences. A large photographic and video display of faces, depicting various hues and genders, gives confirmation of our similarities, yet all of us live under a shadow of destruction.
Humans are capable of great cruelty against themselves and perversely against the habitat that supports us, in addition to creatures that can’t defend themselves. The exhibit’s life-size model of the enormous black rhinoceros is guaranteed to get a “Wow” reaction from younger visitors, but the big and powerful animal needs assistance to assure its continued survival. It’s prized by poachers for its horn, which is built from the same keratin protein that makes our fingernails, as well as claws and armored scales. The endangerment of a species can rally some humans, as with the exhibit’s example of the majority-female Black Mambas Anti-Poaching Unit, which patrols the Balule Nature Reserve in South Africa. By foot and jeep, and unarmed, the Black Mambas seek to curb the killing and maiming of the rare black rhino.
With acts like these, and myriad others, we may rise above differences that are only skin deep.
“Skin: Living Armor, Evolving Identity” is included with Science Museum admission, which is $10 to $16.