The Smithsonian Is Wrong, Bob

5:14 pm EST April 2nd, 2008 | News | 5 Comments

I love stories like this.

Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian? The 11-year-old boy, who lives in Allegan but attends Alamo Elementary School near Kalamazoo, went with his family during winter break to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

Since it opened in 1981, millions of people have paraded past the museum’s Tower of Time, a display involving prehistoric time. Not one visitor had reported anything amiss with the exhibit until Kenton noticed that a notation, in bold lettering, identified the Precambrian as an era.

Kenton knew that was wrong. His fifth-grade teacher, John Chapman, had nearly made the same mistake in a classroom earth-science lesson before catching himself.

“I knew Mr. Chapman wouldn’t tell all these students” bad information, the boy told the Kalamazoo Gazette for a story published Wednesday.

So Kevin Stufflebeam took his son to the museum’s information desk to report Kenton’s concern on a comment form. Last week, the boy received a letter from the museum acknowledging that his observation was “spot on.”

“The Precambrian is a dimensionless unit of time, which embraces all the time between the origin of Earth and the beginning of the Cambrian Period of geologic time,” the letter says.

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5 Responses to “The Smithsonian Is Wrong, Bob”

  1. Quaker in a Basement says:
    April 2, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Kenton Stufflebeam?

    With a name like that, I bet it sucks to be him on the playground.

  2. Sean D. Martin says:
    April 2, 2008 at 5:47 pm

    “a dimensionless unit of time”

    A dimensionless unit? I’m thinking those museum folks still need to work on their phraseology.

  3. midderpidge says:
    April 2, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    I bet the museum was happy to get comments about that display that didn’t start out with “The Earth is 6,000 years old you blaspheming heathens!”

  4. Duros62 says:
    April 3, 2008 at 10:29 am

    Who’s Bob?

  5. Scratch says:
    April 3, 2008 at 8:56 pm

    I also heard that in their response, the museum misspelled both his name and the name of his town. Seriously.