The Proboscidean in the Room | Scene Through the Lens

The bar is a holiday creation of Teddy Sourias and his Craft Concepts Group — the hospitality company behind Center City’s other holiday pop-up bar, Tinsel, as well as Tradesman’s, Blume, Sueño, and U-Bahn.

The name comes from the “White Elephant” office party Christmas gift exchange tradition.

I first spotted the Loxodonta africanus (African elephant) while wandering between newspaper assignments. I recognized it by the ears. They’re really big, and shaped like the continent. Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) have smaller, round ears.

The bar was under construction then, the week after Thanksgiving, so when I happened to be nearby this past weekend I stopped by to re-photograph it at night.

Speaking of the taxonomic order Proboscidea and the group Elephantimorpha, I also photographed the remains of one of their extinct relatives this past week. (How’s that for a segue?)

Mastodons are the most recent members of the family which diverged from the ancestors of elephants at least 25 million years ago. They inhabited North America from the late Miocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago - so they were still around here when humans were.

The bone is at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, one of my favorite of Philadelphia’s many “hidden gems.” It’s really a museum of a museum. A portal into the past, it offers a rare, preserved view of what a Victorian-era natural science museum looked like. It still appears much as it did when Philadelphia merchant, philanthropist, and amateur scientist William Wagner opened it in 1865.

No full-immersion simulations or touch screens with interactive games, just a 100,000-item collection featuring fossils, preserved insects, taxidermy displays, mounted skeletons, rocks, and minerals - all in beautiful wood and glass cases with handwritten labels.

» READ MORE: Images of a Victorian-era scientific society and North Philly hidden gem

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: