#5 - MG - A Peso A Piece

Algunas figuras de la collección Waldemar Julsrud.
Museo Waldemar Julsrud, Acámbaro, Guanajuato.


Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant and amateur archaeologist. In 1944, he excavated some pre-hispanic artefacts at the foot of a mountain in Acámbaro. Unable to dig for more, he offered a peso a piece for every object that was found here and brought back to him intact. This resulted in a vast collection of more than 30.000 ceramic objects, some of which - due to the 'economy' of this archaeological enterprise - inevitably turned out to be awkward anachronisms, like a digital watch on a knight's wrist. A substantial part of Julsrud's collection comprises dinosaurs (two-feet; three-feet; four-feet; three-clawed; two-clawed; mostly friendly in appearance), sparking the imagination of Waldemar Julsrud who concluded that here, in Mexico, people and dinosaurs had once coexisted. For Julsrud, the anachronism turned into a plot.

With Monterroso's short story still in mind, which part is most astonishing: that the dinosaur is still there, or that the human is already there?