Mastodons in the Metro

As the late Terry Pratchett wisely said of his city, "mostly what Ankh-Morpork was built on was Ankh-Morpork."  But sometimes you find -- as it were -- the Fifth Elephant.

(Yes, that was a joke for my fellow Pratchett friki fans.)

There are "museums" all over the Madrid metro of things found while digging it.  Opera has the "Caños del Peral," the remains of the sixteenth century water system.  Chamberí has the "ghost station," a fully restored image of what the metro looked like one hundred years ago, when it first opened.  But I am out in what was countryside until the 20th C, and was a separate village as late as the 1940s.  So when the metro got here there was no urban archeology.  On the other hand, there were mammoths.  Seriously, mastodons.  Also a bunch of other creatures who seem to have liked the Carabanchel area when it was a grassy savannah in the Miocene Period about fifteen million years ago.

So naturally, Carpetana has a mammoth museum.

Entrance to the Carpetana Metro station.  See picture of mammoths at left, by ticket machines.

Some of the museum shows some of the finds (though most were moved to the Natural Sciences Museum of course).

But the most fun part of the "metro museum" is the long tunnel between the two entrances (basically crossing under the Avenida Nuestra Señora de Valvanera, and separating the southern and northern entrances to the station.  It's on a slight slant, and rather than just being a boring subway hall, it has been transformed into a series of drawings that not only provide lots of educational information about the fossils found while digging the metro, but manage to be informative in a tongue-in-cheek, slightly surreal way.  The first panel explains a little about the Miocene, and the fossils found:

The wall in the tunnel leading to Anden 2 of L6 in the Carpetana metro station.  It starts out being very serious and informative.

Having given the information, it then proceeds to set the scene for what the area of the tunnel "might have looked like" in proper "once upon a time" fashion.

The words in the cartoon read, "On a normal day, fourteen million years ago, a few meters below what is today the metro station of Carpetana..."

Then, as you walk along the wall, the pitures and text proceed to describe grazing herds of mammoth and rhinoceros-like creatures, the fierce pre-historic predators like the "oso-lobos" and saber-toothed tigers, and other cat-ancestors, and so on.

The text on the wall reads, "The little puma (pseudoelutus quadridentatus) has found a quiet spot in the branches of an oak tree.  While she naps, her cubs play.  The trick here is to look closely at what the cubs in the central panel are playing with.

If you walk along the tunnel quickly (which I usually do in the mornings when heading to the university), it looks just like a rather bland mural, perhaps similar to the mosaics of animals in the 81st St B-C station in New York, by the Museum of Natural History.

View of the entire tunnel between entrances.

However, at the upper end of the slight incline, the drawings (without any shift in style) become distinctly modern, and the almost throwaway image of the pre-historic puma cubs playing with a helmet with the diamond logo of the metro reappears, when a modern archeologist exclaims that she has found a hard-hat that a careless worker must have lost, and that it "huele a fiera" (smells like a wild animal).

The scene shifts to the more or less present day, and the archeologists and subway workers who are excavating the metro.

The metro workers go on their way, and only a careful reader of the wall (who is not rushing to get to work or school, and too busy or bored to read and look at the entire thing) will notice the very subtle suggestion (which is very Terry Pratchett) that just possibly the tunnel you have just walked through is a kind of time-traveling wormhole, where small objects like hard-hats (or other lost items) might accidentally end up being toys for pre-historic pumas.  Or - by extension - a peacefully grazing pre-historic mastodon might wander into the metro.

I am in favor of subway art generally, and also of nice use of public space for scientific and educational purposes.  Subway art and subway museums with a sense of humor are even better.  Here's the joke of the Carpetana metro tunnel, hidden in plain sight, while commuters rush past.  I'm glad I took a Saturday afternoon to go explore it carefully and take photos.  (This is the advantage of not being quite native.  You take the time to appreciate little wrinkles in your surroundings.)  I can't say I did much else useful today, aside from laundry and lesson planning, and those have been my Saturday activities for most of my adult life.