The Curiosities of Prof. Bell (no relation)

For the next year and more, the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester will host an exhibit titled "Beyond Belief: The Curious Collection of Professor Rufus Excalibur Bell."

The museum's website explains:

Professor Rufus Excalibur Bell is the Higgins Armory Museum’s Curator of Curiosities. . . . The Professor traveled the globe studying dragon-lore and mythology, encountering dragons and dragon-hunters along the way. His studies always focused on the creatures of mythology – harpies, griffins, and of course dragons – insisting that their existence is certain if one simply follows the evidence.

One day the Professor went on a walkabout. Perhaps it was something he learned in one of the several dragon-penned books he had found in a monastery in Spain, or on the Sumerian cuneiform tablet he unearthed at the foot of Mount Kuitarra in Asia. The people at the museum are unsure, since both sources have yet to be successfully translated. The Professor has not been back to the museum for more than a brief moment in anyone's living memory, but the boxes and crates keep coming.

Among the items in those boxes, the exhibit says, have been "a Yeti, a Gargoyle skeleton, and the Argonaut probe," shown above.

Here's a Boston Globe article about the exhibit and two videos of the man behind it, artist Hilary Scott: one serious and one tongue-in-cheek.