While museums are considered to present authoritative representations of natural and cultural history, it is widely accepted that no display neutrally presents an objectively realized exterior world. In this piece, we further that argument by drawing attention to the narrative techniques implicit in staging extinct life, focussing in particular on the similarity between museum display and the tropes of fantasy worldbuilding. We present three short case studies in which Mesozoic life is used in narratives that are straightforwardly at odds with the scientific consensus: the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA; Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire in the UK; and the display contexts of the dinosauroid, a speculative Stenonychosaurus model created by the Canadian Dale Russell. Our aim is to demonstrate how museums put genre and storytelling to counterfactual purposes. Museums, we conclude, build worlds: worlds that are putatively similar to the one we live in but can just as easily be fictitious. The fact/fantasy boundary is almost always more porous than our shared impressions of museum authenticity typically suggest.

虽然博物馆被认为是展示自然和文化历史的权威代表，但人们普遍认为，没有任何展览能够中立地呈现客观现实的外部世界。在这篇文章中，我们通过提请注意隐含在上演灭绝生命中的叙事技巧来进一步论证这一论点，特别关注博物馆展示与幻想世界建设的比喻之间的相似性。我们提出了三个简短的案例研究，其中中生代生命被用于与科学共识直接不一致的叙述中：美国肯塔基州的创造博物馆；英国斯塔福德郡的 Biddulph Grange；以及恐龙类的展示背景，一种推测性的Stenonychosaurus由加拿大戴尔罗素创建的模型。我们的目标是展示博物馆如何将流派和讲故事用于反事实目的。我们得出的结论是，博物馆构建了世界：假定与我们生活的世界相似，但也很容易成为虚构的世界。事实/幻想的界限几乎总是比我们对博物馆真实性的共同印象通常所暗示的更为多孔。