- calendar_today August 10, 2025
MJT: When fire meets fiction and history
On a recent, sleepless night, one of Los Angeles’s most curious institutions, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, suffered serious damage from a fire that started on the night of July 8. The blaze destroyed the museum’s gift shop and left much of the museum covered in smoke damage. The museum estimates revenue lost in the interim while the MJT is closed will total $75,000, and that it will be open sometime next month.
The Culver City-based MJT has enjoyed a cult following among Angelenos for decades. Since its inception in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum has prided itself on disorienting, occasionally suspect exhibitions. (“Dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” reads the museum’s website.) There is not much at the MJT that’s about the Jurassic period at all. It instead finds its roots in Renaissance cabinets of curiosity, also known as wunderkammers (German for “wonder chamber”), the precursors to museums as we know them.
In subsequent years, the MJT has developed a sort of reputation for itself for its careful and considered, if still head-scratching, approach to storytelling. The museum is comprised of both legitimate historical artifacts and exhibits, as well as others that meld fact with fiction to the point that it’s difficult to discern the two. For example, a permanent exhibit on Athanasius Kircher, a real 17th-century polymath and Jesuit scholar and priest, and another on Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian sculptor of microsculpture, a collection of sculptures so minuscule they were on display inside the eye of a needle and made using a single human hair.
But others have leaned into the madness. One display is filled with decomposing dice from famed magician Ricky Jay. Another exhibition, “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” is a visual investigation of trailer parks in the LA area. Other installations include stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and an assortment of letters sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935 from amateur astronomers across the United States. In 2005, the museum added a Russian tea room based on a replica of Tsar Nicholas II’s study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
Firefight and Aftermath
In a more complete account of the fire published by writer Lawrence Weschler (whose 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder tracks the origins of many of the MJT’s exhibitions), it was David Wilson who first noticed flames shooting from the rear of the MJT building. (Wilson lives in a home just behind the museum.) Grabbing two fire extinguishers, Wilson sprinted to the museum. “A ferocious column of flame,” Wilson would later write of the fire, “sprang from the corner wall of the building that fronts on the street and shot toward the roof.”
The two extinguishers, however, were no match for the blaze. Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law came to the scene soon after he first arrived, with a larger extinguisher, which put out the fire just in time. Firefighters who were already on their way had arrived, but told Wilson that had they been on the scene only a minute later, the entire building would have likely gone up.
The smoke, however, had spread to much of the interior of the building. The damage from the smoke, Wilson later wrote, was like “having a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke infiltration like that can be challenging for any museum or facility, but especially for one that prides itself on its presentation and detail. The MJT’s staff and volunteers have been working since the fire to clean the museum and affected areas, a slow and painstaking process.
In the interim, Weschler has made calls for support to those able to help the museum. In his appeal, Weschler has encouraged the MJT’s supporters to make donations to the museum’s general fund to help recoup some of its losses and ensure the museum’s restoration. Weschler, an MJT board member, further implored Angelenos to support the museum, which he called “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country” and a place “so sui generis that it largely just exists apart from all the usual categories and criteria, whether of science or art or storytelling or anything else.”
At this time, the MJT has not confirmed its official reopening date. But there’s optimism that the museum, its humor, play, and philosophy as intact as ever, will open its doors in due time.
