March 19, 2026 · 12:08 pm

Lessons from the Deep Time evaluation

Jurassic dinosaurs in the Deep Time exhibition. Photo by the author.

I’m a big fan of Deep Time, the recently overhauled paleontology hall at the National Museum of Natural History. On this blog, I’ve called it a “masterpiece,” a “standard for excellence in natural history exhibitions,” and “one of the best presentations of the history of life in any medium.” In my own exhibit work, I often look to Deep Time for guidance and inspiration. But all of that is ultimately just the opinion of somebody who spends an inordinate amount of time visiting and thinking about paleontology exhibits. The best tool we have for understanding how an exhibit is serving its primary audience is a summative evaluation. NMNH commissioned just such a report back in 2021, which is now available to read online. Apologies in advance for the second post in a row full of graphs and numbers.

The summative evaluation was carried out by RK&A, Inc (since rebranded as Kera Collective), a private company that specializes in museum audience research. First, the evaluators conducted a timing and tracking exercise, which basically means surreptitiously following randomly selected visitors through the exhibit. Evaluators recorded where and when visitors entered and exited the space, where they stopped and for how long, and observable descriptive details like group composition and approximate age. The evaluators also gave questionnaires to a separate set of visitors to determine what they were learning or taking away from the experience (a control group answered the same questionnaire without seeing the exhibit first). The evaluators provide their own conclusions in the report, which I’ll supplement here with a few of my own interpretations (which they may or may not agree with).

Deep Time concept art, photographed when it was included in the Last American Dinosaurs exhibition.

If you’re not familiar with the layout of Deep Time, you can explore the exhibit virtually here. The concept art above also provides a helpful overview. Generally, the exhibit is a wide open space that visitors can explore freely. Displays are arranged chronologically, but visitors arriving through the primary entrance (right side of this image) are starting in the Pleistocene and moving backward through time. The words “to hall 6” in the lower left indicate where the exhibit continues into a smaller gallery which features a windowed fossil prep lab and displays about early life.

Natural history exhibits are social experiences

Big Bone Lick diorama, featuring a mired mastodon. Photo by the author.

Most people visit natural history museums as families or in groups, and they use the exhibits to facilitate interactions among themselves. I basically treat this as dogma, so it’s nice to see it reinforced by data now and then. RK&A found that 82% of visitors to Deep Time came as part of a group—either mixed-age (i.e. families with kids) or same-age (all adults or occasionally, all kids). Group visitors spent more time in the exhibit than solo visitors, and they looked at or interacted with a greater variety of displays. The nine dioramas scattered throughout the exhibit were particularly appealing to group visitors, who spent more time engaging with them than solo visitors did. With lots of hidden details to discover and point out, dioramas are inherently a good group activity. I suspect the washing machine-like design of the Deep Time dioramas only enhances this, since groups can easily gather around them and view them from both sides.

I don’t think there’s much to add here other than to reiterate that natural history museums are communal places. Whenever we (and I include myself here) are tempted to complain that an exhibit is too surface-level or doesn’t provide enough nuance, we need to remember that an exhibit is not a book. The information provided needs to be accessible to someone who is primarily there to spend time with friends or family. It does not need to exhaustively cover ever last nuance of a topic, because that isn’t appropriate for the medium or the audience.

People don’t spent much time in exhibits

Given how long it takes to conceptualize an exhibit and design it down to the inch (a year per 3,000 square feet is a decent rule of thumb), it can be demoralizing to see how little time audiences actually spend there. Deep Time occupies 31,000 square feet and contains 83 individual displays. RK&A evaluators found that the median dwell time was 10 minutes and 49 seconds, with a median of 11 displays visited. Notably, longer dwell times did not correlate with a higher number of stops. Dwell time was higher for visitors that entered from the main rotunda than from African Voices, suggesting that sight lines might play a significant role in what visitors choose to look at.

The evaluators also found that 79% percent of visitors looked at at least one label. That means one in five visitors passed through the exhibit without reading any words, presumably using their existing knowledge to make sense of what they were seeing. The evaluators didn’t track anyone who appeared to be under 10, so being below reading age shouldn’t be a factor. I think this data reinforces how important it is for exhibit creators to find non-verbal methods to tell stories (artwork and dioramas, for example), rather than assuming that visitors will read lots of text.

Histogram of time spent in Deep Time. Graph created by RK&A.

Dinosaurs are king (especially T. rex)

The Hell Creek tableau at the heart of Deep Time. Photo by the author.

One of the stated goals of Deep Time’s creators was to help visitors understand that the history of life on Earth wasn’t just about dinosaurs. “Are we doing a disservice by overdoing dinosaurs?” is a common refrain among folks who worry about how we relate paleontological science to the public. Whether or not this is a real problem, Deep Time seems comparatively constrained when it comes to dinosaur content. According to my Big Spreadsheet, NMNH has fewer dinosaur fossils on display than is typical among its peer institutions. Just 18% of the included vertebrate specimens are dinosaurs, and these are almost always intermingled with the other animals and plants that made up their ecosystems.

A breakdown of how many people visited various sections of Deep Time. Image created by RK&A.

But in spite of these efforts to keep dinosaurs in their place, evaluators found that the terrible lizards still had more drawing power than anything else in Deep Time. Most of the dinosaur fossils are concentrated on the Cretaceous and Jurassic platforms in the middle of the hall, labeled the Center Area and Back Center Area in the image above. More visitors stopped at the Hell Creek display in the Center Area (where the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is located) than anywhere else in the exhibit. And of the top ten most-visited displays, eight of them featured dinosaurs (the other two were the mastodon and the windowed fossil prep lab).

My takeaway from these results is that the public wants what the public wants, and that’s dinosaurs. Even when you fill a massive space with mammoths and brontotheres and phytosaurs and every other cool prehistoric creature under the sun, people gravitate toward the dinosaurs. And they’re gravitating toward the T. rex in particular, which is noteworthy in itself. As with dinosaurs in general, there’s a fair amount of handwringing that too much attention is paid to the tyrant king. That may well be the case, but the data here implies that even when provided with other options, people are still drawn to T. rex. And if T. rex still has the power to excite people about the natural world after 120 years, I think that’s something museums and educators should continue to bank on.

Most people miss the time indicators

Ice Age animals are sequestered by a wall representing the Younger Dryas mass extinction. Photo by the author.

Deep Time does not require visitors to follow a defined path. The open floorplan allows visitors to move freely through the space, pinballing among the displays that most interest them. However, the exhibit still has a linear narrative: the chronological progression of life over time. To accomplish this, the designers created a number of visual cues to inform visitors of where each display fits on the timeline. Each island display has a tall post that lists the geological period and numerical date. These posts—along with all the graphics and other design elements—are color coded by period. Mass extinctions are marked by opaque walls that physically divide the space. And in case visitors missed all of that, every graphic panel includes a timeline running along the top.

I thought all these techniques for marking time in an open hall were pretty clever, but apparently most visitors would disagree with me. The evaluators found that only 33% of visitors looked at any of the time indicators while exploring the exhibit. While they speculate that visitors could still intuit the chronological narrative without using those indicators, this strikes me as disappointing. I really like the idea of an evolution exhibit where you can look at ecosystems up close while also stepping back to take in the big picture, but evidently this easier said than done.

The climate message is understated

A series of videos about how everyday people can help the Earth is the exhibit’s largest and longest media display. Photo by the author.

Deep Time contains a strong message about how humans are changing the Earth in unprecedented ways. As I wrote in 2019:

The hardest-hitting message [in Deep Time] is about the modern climate crisis. The fact that industrial activity is profoundly warming the climate—a change that comes with dire consequences—is presented in clear, matter-of-fact language. It’s not preachy, it’s not political, it’s just the truth. The exhibition does not explicitly say we should stop harming the planet (although we should), but it clearly presents the evidence that we are, and that we have the ability to stop. This information is centered on an overlook called “the bridge.” The centrality of this location and its proximity to the dinosaurs makes the climate narrative unmissable. The nature of the modern media landscape is such that many NMNH visitors may well have never seen this message presented in non-political terms. I’m eager to see the results.

For some observers, the climate content in Deep Time was a sort of Trojan horse. Visitors would be lured in by fossils, only to be hit with the bad news about humans’ detrimental effect on the planet. I’d argue that this is entirely appropriate: humans are part of the story of life on Earth, and the changes we’re causing in the present are best understood in the context of comparable global changes in the past.

Nevertheless, when asked to articulate the “main message” of Deep Time, only 15% of visitors mentioned climate change (although 48% mentioned the connectivity of humans to all other life). Meanwhile, the tracking data shows that while 23% of visitors entered the bridge area, engagement was unexpectedly low, with a median dwell time of just 47 seconds. These results seem decidedly mixed, but the demographic information about the visitors in the study is particularly informative here. 74% of the individuals given the evaluation have a bachelor’s degree or higher—well above the national average, and a group that is typically better informed about the climate crisis. Indeed, evaluators found that 69% of participants were “alarmed” about climate change generally. As a rule, museum visitors tend to focus on displays about topics they are already somewhat familiar with. So if the participants in the study have above-average awareness of anthropogenic climate change but are picking up on the message in the exhibit at fairly low rates, that suggests to me that this content is not reaching visitors as well as it could be—especially for those who most need to see it.

Specimens are the show-stoppers

A selection of creatures and plants from the early Paleogene. Photo by the author.

The final takeaway that I’d like to point out is that the evaluators found that the fossil specimens were by far the most popular and memorable elements of Deep Time. “Seeing fossils” was the most common response (55%) among visitors asked for their favorite part of the exhibit. This far surpassed the number of visitors who mentioned videos (5%) or interactives (3%). To be fair, the mounted skeletons are the largest and most visible parts of Deep Time. The exhibit has just a couple comparably large video displays, and I’d argue that it only has three proper interactives (it has plenty of touchscreens where visitors select which video they’d like to play, but does that really count as interactivity?). There are over two dozen touchable bronze models, however, which also didn’t rank as highly as the fossils.

I think this is encouraging. Media, replicas, and interactives are all important parts of an exhibit creator’s toolbox, but ultimately the real specimens are what set museum experiences apart from other kinds of attractions. It’s nice to see that those specimens—when artfully and thoughtfully displayed—are still the main draw.

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Filed under Deep Time, dinosaurs, exhibits, Extinct Monsters, museums, NMNH, opinion, reviews

February 27, 2026 · 7:35 pm

Quantifying fossil displays at natural history museums

Over the last few years, I’ve gradually been assembling what I imaginatively call the Big Spreadsheet. It’s a record of every single vertebrate fossil on display at a number of natural history museums, mostly in the United States (so far I haven’t been bold enough to include invertebrates or plants). The Big Spreadsheet tracks basic “tombstone” information about each fossil—what it is, where it was found, how old it is, and so forth. Where possible, I’m also tracking collectors, preparators, original display dates, remounts, and trades with other institutions, among other things.

The Big Spreadsheet differs from things like the Paleobiology Database in that I’m specifically focused on what is or has been on public display. Museums only display a fraction of their collections, and the decisions concerning what is worth displaying are made by people with varying preferences and goals. Perhaps the objective is to showcase what’s unique or unusual in the collection. Or perhaps it’s to comprehensively tell the story of evolution. Maybe there’s a focus on local fossils, fossils collected by specific people, or fossils that represent species that visitors would (or wouldn’t) recognize. There’s no one right way to make a fossil exhibit, but the choices that individuals make nevertheless influence how audiences understand the history of life on Earth and how we come to know about it.

My hope is that the Big Spreadsheet will eventually be complete enough that it can be used to tease out quantitative answers to the questions that vex those of us that are interested in how the public thinks about prehistory. For example, maybe it could illustrate which taxa are over or under-represented in public displays, or if narratives are skewed toward certain localities. Maybe we could see the influence certain individuals (say, the Sternbergs) have had on the public’s view of paleontology. Or maybe we could track the degree to which western museums exploit specimens extracted from colonized lands.

I don’t think the Big Spreadsheet is ready for any of those questions yet. But it is interesting to take a peek at how certain museums measure up to one another with their display collections. The charts below divvy up the data from some of the biggest natural history museums: the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and the Natural History Museum in London (NHM).

Here we can see the overall number of vertebrate fossils on display at each of these museums, and how they sort out by type. One obvious conclusion is that AMNH has an outrageously high number of fossils on display compared to its peers. Note that the difference between a mounted skeleton and an in situ skeleton is sometimes a judgement call (many skeletons displayed in relief are not fully removed from their matrix, but have been partially reposed or have missing elements added).

This chart shows how many fossils on display at each museum are “originals” versus replicas (I’ve counted anything that includes at least some real material as original). These five museums mostly display original fossils, although the ratio is highest at FMNH and lowest at NHM and NMNH. Fish fossils really throw the score, however—these numbers would look different if we were only considering big, charismatic tetrapods.

This chart compares the percentage of fossils on display from each era of the Phanerozoic (the last 541 million years). The Paleozoic gets shorted across the board—it represents about 50% of the Phanerozoic but the percentage of Paleozoic vertebrate fossils on display never tops 20%. Meanwhile, the Cenozoic (12% of the Phanerozoic) seems quite over-represented—that is, if temporal proportionality is ever a goal in creating these displays.

Here, we compare the percentage of fossils on display by region. Any passing familiarity with the history of science will make the focus on North America and Europe rather unsurprising.

This last chart breaks down the percentages by animal type. I’m sure the categories will make some readers squirm, but I’m going for culturally meaningful categories here, not evolutionary meaningful ones. It strikes me that just looking at the numbers of fossils in each category doesn’t necessarily capture the impact on visitors. For instance, dinosaur and mammal skeletons tend to take up a lot more space than fish. I wonder if there’s a way to control for square footage of gallery space and come up with an “impression score” of some kind for each of these groups.

If anyone’s interested in collaborating on the Big Spreadsheet, please give me a shout! I’m particularly keen on connecting with folks with a better statistical background, as well as anyone interested in tallying up fossils on display in the western United States and Canada.

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Filed under collections, dinosaurs, education, exhibits, fish, fossil mounts, history of science, mammals, museums, reptiles, science communication

January 14, 2026 · 6:00 pm

The Last Day of Life Over Time

The video above was kindly shared by Dave Dolak. He shot it on the last day Life Over Time was open to the public, for use in his historic geology course at Columbia College. It is by far the most complete visual record of the exhibit I’ve come across, including in the Field Museum’s own archives. Many thanks to Dave, as well as former student Marcin Warzick, for creating and sharing this video.

What was Life Over Time?

For those not versed in Field Museum lore, Life Over Time was the predecessor to the museum’s current paleontology exhibition, Evolving Planet. If you visited between 1994 and 2004, this was the version you saw. It was the shortest-lived and generally weirdest iteration of the museum’s fossil halls, but it remains a compelling showcase of a particular era in the philosophy behind natural history exhibits.

Life Over Time had a free-wheeling and whimsical tone, and there were examples of this approach almost anywhere you looked. In one gallery, a fish-headed croupier invited visitors to spin a giant roulette wheel to see the average species’ chance of escaping extinction. An automated puppet show put a cartoony spin on the Proterozoic oxygenation crisis. On various video monitors throughout the exhibit, CBS anchor Bill Kurtis provided “weather reports” describing the conditions during each geologic period. There was a cow skeleton in a dentist’s office, and even a bouncy, ridable trilobite.

The primary force behind this approach to exhibit-making was Michael Spock. Recruited from the Children’s Museum of Boston, Spock joined the Field Museum in 1986 as the Vice President of Public Programs. At the time, galleries were organized after the way the museum’s academic curators thought about their subjects. Spock’s approach was very different—as he put it, exhibits should be “for someone, not about something.” He encouraged his staff to experiment with new ways to be relatable and approachable to the museum’s primary audience (generally, families with children). Life Over Time and the other exhibits made during Spock’s tenure were all about meeting visitors where they were—answering the questions they had, rather than the questions curators wanted to answer.

Nevertheless, it was apparently possible to go to far. Many of the allegorical displays (like the cow dentist) were confusing to visitors. Lab-like spaces, which featured lots of interactives but few specimens, were consistently bypassed because they felt like classrooms. Upkeep was also a problem. The high-concept interactives throughout Life Over Time weren’t always designed with durability in mind, and frequent replacement of loose parts was getting expensive and time-consuming.

So between 2004 and 2006, Life Over Time was transformed into Evolving Planet. The new exhibit occupies the same space and features several of the same star attractions (the coal forest, Apatosaurus, and Megatherium, among others), but was otherwise completely rewritten and redesigned. The number of fossils on display nearly tripled, and the comic, allegorical displays were replaced with more literal depictions of life in the past. Overall, Evolving Planet swung the pendulum back just a bit. It’s still fun, colorful, and visitor-centric, but the focus is more on the real fossils and the museum’s in-house research.

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Filed under exhibits, FMNH, museums, science communication

September 18, 2025 · 2:38 pm

Iguanas, Poodles, and Pantodonts

The blog has been quiet this year, and a major reason for that is that my day job has been anything but. So in lieu of discussion about exhibits from decades past, here’s a bit about the decision making that went into some brand new ones that I worked on this year! New, in-depth articles about traditional Extinct Monsters fare are in progress, I promise.

Reptiles Alive

As the title suggests, Reptiles Alive is an exhibition that features live reptiles. This was a collaborative project between the Field Museum and Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland, a zoo in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. Reptiland provided the animals, their enclosures, and their human caretakers, while we designed and built a full-sized exhibition around them. I wrote and developed the new material alongside Associate Curator of Herpetology Sara Ruane.

Reptiles Alive is straightforwardly about getting people excited to see and learn about incredible animals. Often, an exhibition calls for a grand narrative or lofty learning goals, but I thought the best approach for this one was to simply follow the “rule of cool.” Does a fact or image or display idea make people say, “wow, that’s amazing?” Then it it belongs in the show. Sometimes “because it rules” is a perfectly valid reason to do something—that’s why we have a 110-foot black mamba skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

Reptiles Alive is organized Planet Earth-style. Each section features a biome type, but isn’t constrained to a particular part of the world. This allowed us to have some fun with the design and create unique soundtracks and lighting for each area: baking sunlight radiates over the desert section while animated snakes slither across the floor in the tropics.

The other benefit of the biome-based organization is that we didn’t have to get bogged down with phylogeny in every label. Reptile classification is full of nested categories and apparent contradictions: for example, a snake is a kind of lizard, but there are are also legless lizards that aren’t snakes. Rather than distracting visitors with constant definitions and explanations, we opted to move the entire classification discussion to a single, prominent “object theater” near the exhibition’s entrance. Spotlights shine on mounted skeletons in different combinations as a narrator walks visitors through the main reptile groups and how to recognize them, while also clarifying that amphibians are not reptiles (but birds are). In under two minutes, visitors gain a shared vocabulary they can use as they explore the rest of the exhibition.

Naturally, the live animals are the stars of the show. Gwangi, a 38-year-old, puppy-tame Cuban rock iguana, is my favorite, but it’s also a lot of fun watching the European glass lizard dig in and out of his bedding, or seeing the reticulated python splash around in the water. We also made use of the museum’s collection of spectacularly life-like model reptiles from the early 20th century, and commissioned a few new ones as well. The models introduce visitors to creatures they might never have heard of, as well as one with a role in Field Museum lore.

There are no touchscreens in Reptiles Alive. Instead, we went all-in on simple, tactile interactives. Whether you’re puppeteering a pair of iguanas to demonstrate lizard body language or testing your puny human strength against the bite force of a Nile crocodile, the action being performed always directly illustrates the concept under discussion. The fanciest piece of hardware in the exhibition is a thermal camera. It’s one thing to tell visitors that reptiles are cold-blooded, but it’s quite another to see the zookeeper hold a room-temperature snake up to the camera. The human glows orange while the snake matches the blues and purples of the space around it.

The final display originated as a joke. We wanted to make a big diorama, but detailed botanical models are just about the most expensive and time-consuming thing you can make. Thinking about reptile habitats without much vegetation, I glibly offered that we could recreate the “gator on a golf course” scene from Happy Gilmore. But we soon realized that was the perfect ending for our exhibition: draining swampland to build golf courses is an example of how humans are invading reptile habitats. That means we’re going to encounter reptiles more often, and we’ll need to learn to live alongside them. Hopefully, visitors that came in fearing reptiles will leave with respect and admiration for them.

Reptiles Alive runs until April 2026.

Changing Face of Science: Sara Ruane

In 2022, the Field Museum launched The Changing Face of Science, a series of exhibitions that profile scientists affiliated with the museum who are women or people of color. The series is intended to inspire young visitors and show how how diverse perspectives and backgrounds can contribute to science.

The latest entry in the series features aforementioned herpetology curator Sara Ruane. Sara studies the diversity and evolution of snakes, and has been fascinated by reptiles from a young age. However, Sara also wanted the exhibition to communicate that being a scientist is only part of who she is. Sara loves training her toy poodles, shopping for designer bags, and curating her unique fashion sense—you can be a great scientist while also being a complete person.

Displays include a recreation of a tabletop “museum” (that Sara made for her family at age six) and the contents of her fieldwork bag (which include everything from a Leatherman multitool to lipgloss). The centerpiece is a pair of office dioramas. One is Sara’s office today, and the other is that of Karl Schmidt, who was the Field Museum herpetology curator a century ago. I think it’s fair to say that we had a blast reconstructing Schmidt’s office, using his original desk and much of his actual book collection. Visitors are encouraged to compare the two spaces: Schmidt’s office is more traditionally professorial, while Ruane’s is full of fun decorations and mementos. But both scientists have the same jar of garter snakes on their desks (museum specimens are an eternal resource), and are referencing the same book (books are also eternal).

Sara’s exhibition runs until January 2026.

After the Age of Dinosaurs

That brings us to After the Age of Dinosaurs. This exhibition is about the immediate aftermath of the end-Cretaceous extinction, and how the world’s ecosystems reassembled after that global catastrophe. But a summary of the subject matter doesn’t fully encapsulate what this show is about. The early Paleogene was famously a time of giant birds and little horses. Taking some inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, we played with the idea that sizes are askew and nothing is as it seems. The exhibition is colorful, whimsical, and full of displays that are just a little weird.

My colleague Marie Georg led the development of this exhibition—I joined a little later on to flesh out and write the second half. Curators Ken Angielczyk and Fabiany Herrera advised on the science, along with nearly a dozen other specialists. Meanwhile, the team worked with Chicago poster artist Jay Ryan to create the look of the show. Jay’s style is bright and bold, with a bit of a pop art feel. He brought those signature qualities to the six murals and nearly sixty standalone illustrations he created for After the Age of Dinosaurs, and the rest of the exhibition’s design follows suit. The result is a paleontology exhibit that looks nothing like the Field Museum’s permanent Evolving Planet, or really any other major fossil exhibit that I’m aware of.

The fossils on display include both brand-new specimens collected during the 2024 field season and classics from the collection that we’d been waiting for an excuse to show off. Visitors can see the largest Megacerops skull ever found, the world’s only known cattail fossil, the oldest grapes from the western hemisphere, a perfectly-preserved passerine bird that was just named this year, and at least four fossils that are in press and so haven’t been formally named yet. The highlight for me is the Diatryma cast skeleton, which was acquired in a trade with the American Museum of Natural History in 1937. This set of disarticulated parts had never made it onto display before, so it was exciting to see it assembled into a standing mount for the first time.

Since so many early Paleogene fossils are on the small side, large media and media-adjacent displays often take center stage. After the Age of Dinosaurs opens with a dramatic presentation of how the asteroid impact devastated global ecosystems, animated in a paper cut-out style by Rachel Oftedahl. A projection of ash billowing through a burnt-out forest adds a somber mood to the next gallery. Look closely at the life-sized projections of pantodonts later in the exhibition and you’ll see their eyes periodically blink. And in the Green River section, visitors can add to the ubiquitous forest soundtrack by standing in spotlights shaped like different animals—these trigger unique sounds that add to the gallery-wide chorus. I’m excited to see how visitors respond to these semi-hidden, playful elements within the exhibition, and how they contribute to the experience overall.

After the Age of Dinosaurs runs until January 2027.

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Filed under exhibits, FMNH, mammals, museums, paleoart, reptiles

August 9, 2025 · 11:51 am

A closer look at the “Natural History Museum of North America”

A headless Tyrannosaurus skeleton at the fictional Natural History Museum of North America.

It seems that another Jurassic Park film is upon us. As I’ve written about before, the phenomenon that is Jurassic Park and it’s various sequels and spin-offs has played a central role in the public’s general awareness of dinosaurs for 30 years and counting. Whether we like it or not, every bit of public-facing media concerning dinosaurs (exhibits, books, documentaries, and more) must contend with Jurassic Park‘s long shadow. The latest film—Jurassic World: Rebirth—is just alright, but in a series first, it includes a scene in a natural history museum.

The Jurassic Park films have referenced the century-old association between museums and dinosaurs before. The first Jurassic Park played with this iconography in its classic finale, when the flesh-and-blood Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor tear down pair of skeletal mounts in the titular park’s visitor center. Those cast skeletons were supplied by Research Casting International: the T. rex was a combination of LACM 23844 and the Royal Terrell Museum’s Black Beauty specimen, while the sauropod was a Camarasaurus with an alternate head. The implication of the scene is clear: the living, cloned dinosaurs represent new technology and scientific progress smashing the old and obsolete incarnations of paleontology to bits. A museum-like setting also features in several scenes in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. In that film, the skeletal mounts—nearly all of which came straight from the Gaston Design catalog—are set up in the home of a wealthy dinosaur enthusiast.

The visitor center rotunda in Jurassic Park.

In Jurassic World: Rebirth, the characters don’t just encounter museum-like displays, they visit an actual museum in New York City. The museum isn’t named in the film, but photos of props reveal that it’s the Natural History Museum of North America, an obvious stand-in for the American Museum of Natural History. As the exposition-heavy scene plays out, we see the dinosaur hall is being dismantled. Pieces of skeletons and other exhibits are carted up and loaded away by a crew of hard-hatted workers.

“It’s a hell of a day here. They’re closing us down,” says paleontologist Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey. It’s not clear who “they” or “us” is in this scenario. Is the entire museum being shut down? The paleontology department? Or just this dinosaur exhibit? The film doesn’t have an answer to any of these questions, and the scene’s setting seems to be mostly symbolic: the public has grown weary of the feral dinosaur populations that have spread around the world at this point in the Jurassic Park universe. A catastrophic decline in museum attendance is apparently a side effect of that disinterest.

Looking up at the “Titanosaurus” skeleton.

Despite the hazy rationale for its deinstallation, we can still infer a fair amount about this fictional exhibition during the five minutes the characters linger within its walls. There are at least two galleries: an outer gallery flanked by large windows and dominated by a sauropod skeleton that straddles two pedestals, and up a set of stairs, an inner gallery that houses the T. rex skeleton.

The halls are decked in extravagant Baroque trim. This lavish architectural style was popular in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, but is somewhat out of place in New York City, where Beaux-Arts was the norm for large public buildings (like museums) built around the turn of the 20th century (like AMNH). A few Baroque revival buildings—mostly churches from the late 19th century—do exist in New York, however. Notably, the Baroque influence extends beyond the walls and ceilings and into the exhibit elements: gilded sauropods adorn a set of columns in the outer hall, and a high-contrast mural depicting what might be Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus is visible in the background of a couple shots.

The Painted Hall at Old Royal Naval College. Image from ornc.org.

The museum scene was actually shot in the UK, at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. The dinosaur galleries are in fact the famous Painted Hall. Designed by James Thornhill and constructed between 1707 and 1726, this space was originally a dining hall but is now a popular tourist attraction. The immense murals depict an assortment of mythological and historical figures: King William III is at the center of mural on the ceiling, while George I holds court in the mural on the rear wall (this virtual tour explores the murals’ subjects in detail). Both murals are visible in Jurassic World: Rebirth (it’s best not to wonder why a New York museum is decorated with images of British monarchs).

The British sensibilities extend to the exhibit elements. In the filmmakers’ commentary, director Gareth Edwards notes that he was inspired by the dinosaur hall at the London Museum of Natural History, which was considered as a shooting location. Much like that real-word exhibit, some of the displays at the North American Museum of Natural History are suspended above visitors’ heads and are partially hidden in shadow. The font and other design elements of the exhibit signage are also similar to the London museum.

Quetzalcoatlus skeleton and Mosasaurus skull on display amongst Baroque decor.

Taking a closer look at the dinosaurs themselves, the T. rex appears to be in an old-fashioned tail-dragging pose, or perhaps it’s mirroring the classic roaring stance from the end of the first film. The “When dinosaurs roamed the Earth” banner that matches the Jurassic Park visitor center is presumably an in-universe coincidence. A Quetzalcoatlus skeleton is suspended in front of the doorway, and a very large Mosasaurus skull hangs to its left. We also see a Triceratops skull and Deinonychus skeleton already crated for removal, along with some unidentified vertebrae and ribs on tables.

The fossils are realized on film with a combination of physical reproductions and CGI. The Triceratops skull is (rather crudely) sculpted, while the T. rex skull and Deinonychus skeleton appear to be casts of actual fossils. The Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurus, and T. rex body are CGI. The sauropod legs were likely present on set, but the rest of its body was filled in digitally when it appears in frame. None of the mounts have the supporting armatures needed for real fossils, so we can conclude that within the film universe, this exhibit only featured casts and reproductions.

Note the gilded sauropods on the columns to nowhere and the original Painted Hall red benches.

Taken together, the evidence on screen suggests that the Natural History Museum of North America is of similar age to AMNH, and the space occupied by the dinosaur exhibit was built as a Baroque revival in the late 1800s. Dinosaur-themed trim like gilded sauropods indicates that this has been a paleontology exhibit for all or most of that time. There have been recent updates, however. Some exhibit text is displayed on animated LED screens (this is most visible below the Mosasaurus skull) and other graphics are backlit. Text beneath the header “Incubation and Development” discusses the process of cloning dinosaurs—in the Jurassic Park universe, the existence of cloned dinosaurs became public knowledge when a T. rex briefly rampaged through San Diego in 1997, so this text must have been added sometime after that. An animated video summarizes how the feral dinosaur populations that began to spread in 2018 ultimately did not survive in the temperate latitudes, and most living dinosaurs now only thrive at the equator. This display could not be more than a couple years old at the time of Jurassic World: Rebirth.

The age of the Mesozoic reptiles on display is harder to pinpoint. Let’s ignore for the moment the many differences between these skeletons and their real-life counterparts (yes, there are no real mosasaurs that big, nobody would reconstruct a Quetzalcoatlus skeleton with that crest, and the Triceratops‘s eyes are weirdly placed). Few of these animals were known at the turn of the century, so most would have to be relatively recent additions. Quetzalcoatlus, for instance, was named in 1975, and sauropods the size of the “Titanosaurus” on display weren’t discovered until the late 80s (amusingly, the sauropod skeleton has a Camarasaurus skull, a fate that is apparently not just reserved for apatosaurines).

The blue illustration on this panel is subtly animated.

As discussed, the skulls and skeletons are all clearly plastic casts and models, which would date them to the 1970s at the earliest. The dynamic poses of the sauropod and Quetzalcoatlus also suggest a mid-Dinosaur Renaissance timeframe. What’s really interesting, though, is that all these skeletons are the chocolate brown color of fossilized bone. In a world where living dinosaurs exist, I would imagine that newer displays—whether real or replica—would be made to look like recent animals. Replica skeletons would be ivory-colored, and perhaps accompanied by taxidermy mounts or preserved samples of feathers, skin, and other soft structures. With that in mind, I’d say these skeletal displays were overhauled in the 80s or 90s, before there was widespread access to cloned dinosaurs. Overlays of new text and media were added in subsequent decades in an effort to keep the exhibit relevant in the “neo-Jurassic age.”

Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), Zora Bennet (Scarlett Johansson), and Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) hang their heads in shame after Loomis calls Quetzalcoatlus an “avian dinosaur.”

Loomis’s comment that “five years ago, you’d have to wait for hours” to get into the exhibit doesn’t make much sense with this timeline—if the public was going to lose interest in prehistoric dinosaurs, surely it would have happened before 2015, when the Jurassic World theme park was going strong. Perhaps the museum saw a brief spike in attendance around the time living dinosaurs started showing up in people’s backyards?

To be honest, much of the timeline of Jurassic World: Rebirth is illogical, and it probably has something to do with the film being hastily written and rushed into production. But I hope you’ll agree that even the worst fiction can be fun playground for thought experiments like this one. Did you catch any details in the Natural History Museum of North America Scene that I missed?

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Filed under AMNH, art history, dinosaurs, exhibits, movies, museums

March 23, 2025 · 10:32 am

Interpreting the most-touched dinosaur bone of all time

In 1943, sawmill operator Daniel Edward Jones and his wife Vivian went prospecting for uranium west of their home in Delta, Colorado. In a gully near Potter Creek, they came upon a nearly seven foot-long dinosaur bone eroding out of the ground. It’s unclear exactly how and when they managed to excavate and remove the gigantic fossil, but sometime before 1955, the Joneses collected the bone and donated it to the Smithsonian Institution. That bone—identified as the humerus of a Brachiosaurus altithorax—has been on display at the National Museum of Natural History ever since.

The Potter Creek humerus (USNM V 21903) never made much of a splash scientifically. It wasn’t mentioned in any research paper until 1987, when Jim Jensen figured it alongside several other Brachiosaurus bones he collected at the same locality. The referral to Brachiosaurus has been questioned (e.g. Taylor 2009), but without any closely related dinosaurs known from Late Jurassic North America, researchers have generally been happy to use the available name.

Arguably, the Potter Creek humerus has a greater legacy as an object on display, and more specifically as an object to be touched. Since 1955, the fossil has been in easy reach of visitors, and has often been accompanied by signage inviting visitors to touch it. Extrapolating slightly from available visitation statistics and multiplying by the number of years on display, this fossil could easily have been touched by over 200 million people—possibly as many as 400 million. I’m unaware of any other dinosaur specimen that has been handled by that many individuals.

Let’s take a look at how the most-touched dinosaur bone of all time (if you know of other contenders for that title, please let me know!) has been interpreted over the years.

Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

One of the largest known dinosaur limb bones

This humerus (upper arm bone) of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus alithorax was found by Mr. D.E. Jones of Delta, Colorado. It is from the Morrison formation, of late Jurassic age (about 130,000,000 years ago), in Montrose County, Colorado. Brachiosaurus was a giant among dinosaurs, much larger than the familiar Brontosaurus; it may have weighed as much as 55 tons. It is distinguished from other dinosaurs by the fact that its front legs were somewhat longer than its hind legs. This feature, the great length of the neck, and the projecting nostrils on top of the head seem to have been adaptations to its presumed life habits. Brachiosaurus was a plant eater that walked along the bottoms of lakes, lifting its head to breathe above the surface of the water. Brachiosaurus is known from North America, Africa, and Europe. This humerus is 6 feet 10 inches long, its position in the body of Brachiosaurus is shown in the sketch, where the humerus is drawn in red. Note the much smaller humerus in the nearby skeleton of the dinosaur Diplodocus.

As mentioned, the Potter Creek humerus was first put on display at NMNH in 1955. It was mounted on a wooden pedestal in front of the Diplodocus skeleton, near the front of the museum’s spacious fossil hall. As seen in the photo above, the bone’s damaged shaft was not restored, although some sort of consolidant must have been applied to keep it from crumbling all over the floor.

The 181-word text panel accompanying the fossil was likely written by curator Charles Gazin, who had led the Vertebrate Paleontology division since 1946. The text is quite long and meanders through several distinct topics—addressing what the specimen is, who found it, how old it is, where it was found, how big the animal was, what the animal looked like, how the animal behaved, where else the animal lived, the exact size of the bone, and finally how it would fit into a complete skeleton. The text does not address any qualities of the fossil that visitors can actually observe until the very end.

Consideration of how visitors use museum exhibits—and how exhibits can best meet visitors’ needs—was in its infancy at this time. At NMNH and most of its peer institutions, labels were written by curators—experts in their fields but not necessarily in best practices for communicating with broad audiences. Exhibit text was by experts, for experts, and any visitors not up to parsing dense paragraphs like this one were left to make their own meaning of the exhibits.

It is notable, however, that this label compares the Potter Creek humerus to the nearby Diplodocus. As was typical of natural history exhibits at the time, the NMNH fossil hall wasn’t arranged in any particular order. Specimens were placed on platforms or in free-standing cases. This modular design allowed the hall to be rearranged with relative ease when new specimens were acquired, but it did not lend itself to any sort of overarching narrative for the displays. This passing reference to another specimen was as close to narrative cohesion as exhibits of this era could get.

Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Would you like to touch a dinosaur bone?

This is a humerus (arm bone) of the sauropod Brachiosaurus alithorax. The position of the bone and the appearance of the animal are shown in the accompanying drawing. A close relative of Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus was the bulkiest land animal that ever lived, weighing about 55 tons. Like other sauropods, he spent most of his time in ponds, lakes, or rivers. If you want to be able to tell your friends that you touched a dinosaur bone, here is your chance.

The NMNH fossil halls were updated in 1963 as part of a decade-long, Smithsonian-wide modernization project. For the first time, an exhibit design specialist worked with the curators to compose the paleontology exhibits. Designer Ann Karras considered how visitors would move through the space, and attempted to create a coherent story of the evolution of life over time. Text panels were part of the aesthetics and organization of the exhibition, and were written with consistent style and terminology.

The text accompanying the Potter Creek humerus may have been written by Barbara Craig, and by modern standards, it’s pretty good (ignoring the now-debunked idea that sauropods spent their time in the water, and the choice to use a masculine pronoun for a dinosaur of unknown sex). The header is a call to action, inviting visitors to touch the fossil. The remaining 82 words are snappy and useful—the object is clearly identified, and the accompanying illustration is referenced right away. Visitors can find the information they want (what am I looking at? What should I do here?) right away, without having to fight through excessively long or wordy prose. It’s remarkable how well this label adheres to the standards for exhibit text that Beverly Serrell would first put forward over twenty years later.

Photo by Michael Brett-Surman.
Photo by Flickr user grafxmangrafxman.

Size in dinosaurs—how big is enormous?

Early dinosaurs were relatively small—about the size of the smaller Camptosaurus displayed to your left. However, these “small” dinosaurs were already larger than most land animals of their time. Although some lines of dinosaurs never got much larger, most produced huge forms. The average live weight of a dinosaur was about 5 tons. No other land-dwelling reptiles have ever approached this size and only about 2 percent of land-dwelling mammals have done so. The smallest dinosaur known, though no larger than a chicken, was still larger than 80 percent of all land mammals living today.

Brachiosaurus leg bone

The bone displayed below and in green in the drawing is from the upper part of the front leg of Brachiosaurus, one of the largest of all dinosaurs. Although Diplodocus had a longer neck and tail, Brachiosaurus was much taller and more massive and outweighed Diplodocus by several tons. Bones of a still larger animal similar to Brachiosaurus have been found in Colorado.

The dinosaur exhibits at NMNH were next updated in 1982. This time, the Potter Creek humerus was relocated to the right side of Diplodocus. With all of the mounted skeletons in a central corral and behind a plexiglass barrier, the role of the humerus as a designated touchable fossil was exceptionally clear. During the renovation, a fiberglass cowl was affixed to the damaged part of the humerus. This restoration makes the bone appear thicker than it actually is.

The accompanying text was written by postdoctoral research associates Jessica Harrison and George Stanley, under advisement from curator Nicolas Hotton. Their task was to balance the needs of visitors with demands for precise language from scientists. The resulting label is twice as long as the previous version and, I would argue, not nearly as useful. The primary text isn’t about the humerus at all—instead it discusses the range of dinosaur sizes and compares them to modern animals. The humerus is finally mentioned toward the bottom of the graphic, where it is once again compared to Diplodocus. For some reason, the donor is listed as Tony Jones.

Photo by the author.
Photo by the author.

How much heavier?

Sauropod dinosaur (arm bone)

Brachiosaurus altithorax

Lived 152 million years ago

Morrison Formation, Montrose Co., Colorado

USNM 21903

Donated by Eddie and Vivian Jones

You can see by it’s arm bone that Brachiosaurus (right) was bigger than Diplodocus (in front of you). The Brachiosaurus humerus is two times as thick as that of Diplodocus. That means it came from an animal that weighed nearly five times as much, about 140,000 lbs (64,000 kg)!

The most recent renovation of the NMNH fossil halls was completed in 2019. For the first time, the Potter Creek humerus is mounted vertically, in the orientation it would have held in a living Brachiosaurus. While requiring a sturdier and more sophisticated mounting structure, this display gives visitors a clearer understanding of the fossil before them.

Angela Roberts Reeder was the lead writer of the current exhibit text, assisted by several co-writers. At 51 words, this is the shortest label for the Potter Creek humerus yet. Some of the basic information—the animal’s name, how old the fossil is, and where it was found—is collapsed into a standardized and compact “tombstone” ID block. The remaining text covers a single subject: the mathematical relationship between the bone’s width and the living weight of the animal it belonged to.

This is considered good practice. According to Serrell, visitors are primarily concerned with the objects on display, not the exhibit text. They will look for text if they expect it to answer their immediate questions and improve their understanding. Visitors will quickly scan the available text, and if it doesn’t seem to be helping them, they will move on. Therefore, exhibit text needs to get to the point, and fast. Short labels aren’t about dumbing things down—they’re about finding the right words to communicate important ideas to the largest possible number of people.

Reeder’s label for the Potter Creek humerus is a great example. It immediately answers the most likely questions: “what is this thing?” and “how big was the dinosaur it came from?” Then, taking advantage of that momentary attention, it enhances visitors’ understanding by explaining how scientists can know the size of an animal from a single bone. The standardized ID block resolves most further questions without making visitors hunt though a long paragraph. Rather than trying to tackle too many concepts at once, this label omits any information on the life appearance or habits of Brachiosaurus.

Looking at the four generations of interpretation of the Potter Creek humerus, there are some recurring themes. The size of the bone and the animal it belonged to has always been referenced. And there is always an accompanying illustration showing where the bone fits into a complete Brachiosaurus. However, the earlier labels addressed the life habits of living sauropods with greater specificity (and as it turns out, inaccuracy—Brachiosaurus did not spend all its time wallowing in lakes in rivers). The newer labels are somewhat more technical, in that they focus on comparative measurements among fossils. This is surprising—I would have expected that earlier generations of paleontologists would have been more concerned with comparing figures and less interested in the total biology and ecology of extinct animals.

I was also surprised that there was not a clear trend toward shorter text. Instead, the length of the label has oscillated with each generation. And it’s worth noting that the earliest label is not burdened with excessive scientific jargon. The language has always been clear—what varies is how it is organized and how long it is overall.

References

D’Emic, M.D. and Carrano, M.T. 2019. Redescription of brachiosaurid sauropod dinosaur material from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation, Colorado, USA. The Anatomical Record 303:4:732–758.

Jensen, J.A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47:592–608.

Marsh, D.E. 2014. From Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: An ethnography of fossil exhibits production at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. http://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/50177

Serrell, B. 2015. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (2nd Edition). Rowman and Littlefield.

Taylor, M.P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its genetic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janesch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29:3:787–803.

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Filed under Deep Time, dinosaurs, exhibits, museums, NMNH, sauropods, science communication

December 26, 2024 · 9:21 pm

It’s time to renovate the AMNH fossil halls

An overview of the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. Photo by the author.

Spending a day at the American Museum of Natural History is always a joy. Particularly in its fourth floor fossil halls, AMNH stands head and shoulders above peer museums in the sheer breadth of collections on display. Something in the ballpark of 600 fossil vertebrate specimens are included, including no less than 135 mounted skeletons. Many of these represent taxa that cannot be seen anywhere else in North America. With each visit, however, I feel more and more that the AMNH fossil halls are showing their age. This is not surprising—the current exhibition opened in stages between 1994 and 1996. Strange as it seems to aging millennials like myself, that was 30 years ago. By comparison, the prior iteration of the fossil halls was completed in 1956, and was 31 years old when renovation planning began in 1987.

The “Brontosaur Hall,” part of the midcentury iteration of the AMNH fossil exhibits. Photo courtesy of the AMNH Research Library.

In their time, the current fossil halls were a monumental accomplishment—taking nine years to complete and costing $44 million (which would be more than $90 million today). Steering the ship was Lowell Dingus, a paleontologist by training who assumed the role of Project Director for the renovation. Dingus led a twenty-person team of AMNH researchers, writers, and preparators dedicated to the project, and Ralph Appelbaum Associates was hired to design a new look for the halls.

Initially, the intention was to only replace the two oldest halls, which featured Cenozoic mammal fossils. Some of these displays had not been altered since the 1920s, and others were boarded over because so many specimens had been removed for study or conservation. But when George Langdon and William Moynihan took over museum leadership positions, they decided to expand the project to include the two dinosaur halls. With the further addition of a new Hall of Vertebrate Origins (in a space previously occupied by the library) and a fourth floor Orientation Center, the project rapidly ballooned to cover 40,000 square feet of exhibit space and the entire story of vertebrate evolution.

On the design side, the team sought to restore the original architecture in each hall, ensuring that both the specimens and the spaces they occupied would come, as Dingus put it, “as close to their original grandeur as possible.” In many cases, century-old architectural elements—such as windows and molded ceilings—were still intact behind panels that had been installed over them during previous renovations. These features were painstakingly restored, or when necessary, recreated. Classic decorative elements, from the colonnades to the elegant chandeliers, were reintroduced.

The former “Brontosaur Hall” is now the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs. Photo by the author.

Dingus also had transformative plans for the fourth floor’s interpretation and organization. Rather than the traditional walk through time that characterized the midcentury exhibits, the renovated halls would be arranged according to phylogenetic classification: visitors were meant to explore the vertebrate family tree as they moved through the fourth floor galleries. Each large hall represented a major branch, and was further divided into smaller alcoves representing specific groups, like turtles, artiodactyls, or ornithomimid dinosaurs.

While this organization closely matched how paleontologists think about life on Earth (particularly those at AMNH who helped pioneer the cladistic methodology), it is unfamiliar to most visitors. For Dingus and his colleagues, this wasn’t a flaw—it was the point. “Is it enough simply to discuss what visitors want to know about,” Dingus wrote at the time, “or do exhibitions have a responsibility to broaden their audiences’ horizons by presenting challenging information?”

Field Museum visitors play with a zoetrope in the shadow of an Apatosaurus skeleton. Photo by John Weinstein, © Field Museum

Dingus was planting a big, blue AMNH flag on one side of an ongoing debate about the role of museums and the purpose of their exhibits. “There is a prominent, contemporary school of exhibition design that advocates giving the visitor only what he or she asks for,” he wrote. “I vehemently disagree with this philosophy. We cannot pitch all the information to the lowest common denominator of interest and intellect.”

Dingus was likely referring to the philosophy championed by Michael Spock, who was at that time the Vice President for Public Programming at the Field Museum of Natural History. Spock had previously gained industry attention for his exploratory, interactive exhibitions at the Boston Children’s Museum. At the Field Museum, his approach was to make exhibitions “for someone, rather than about something.” Under Spock, projects began by asking community members what they were curious about, rather then by dictating what was important. Spock-era exhibits were filled with interactive and touchable displays meant to illustrate scientific concepts—some more successfully than others. They also tended to embrace a “less is more” aesthetic, taking deep dives into a few examples rather than trying to represent the full breadth of the museum’s collection.

A group of children get updates on climatic changes over time in the form of news reports. Photo by John Weinstein, © Field Museum

For better or worse, Dingus’s fossil halls at AMNH could not be more different than the ones Spock oversaw at the Field Museum. There are no levers to pull, no “Dial-a-Dinosaur” phones, and certainly no rideable trilobites (all features of the early 90s Field Museum). Instead, the focus is on the fossils, and—as mentioned—there are far more of them on display than at any comparable museum. The closest things to interactives are the computer terminals, which allow visitors to select from menus of scientist-narrated videos.

A display of fossil horses at AMNH. Photo by the author.

As it happened, Spock’s version of the Field Museum fossil halls barley lasted a decade, while Dingus’s AMNH exhibits remain mostly unchanged today: aside from the Patagotitan in the Orientation Center, the next largest addition might be a Tiktaalik cast skull in one case in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. So how have the AMNH halls fared?

I sympathize with Dingus’s aim to “promote science literacy and develop a better awareness of how science can help illuminate the world.” That said, the AMNH fossil halls are clear example of a debunked educational style known as the “deficit model”—briefly, this is an approach to teaching that assumes students are empty vessels that can be simply filled with information. Moreover, I’m not convinced that the phylogenetic arrangement of the halls is particularly helpful for most visitors. The AMNH fossil halls are perfect for college students already learning about the diversity of life. But for most everyone else, the organization is opaque at best and a hindrance to understanding at worst. Making sense of phylogeny requires a lot of groundwork up front—even something as basic as knowing which direction to read a tree is not common knowledge. The Meryl Streep-narrated video in the Orientation Hall attempts to bridge this gap, but it’s overlong and not terribly engaging. Meanwhile, the multi-entrance, cyclical shape of the fourth floor means that only a fraction of visitors are actually starting in the Orientation Hall.

An example of a graphic with bizarre kerning and layout choices. Photo by the author.

Within the galleries, the central pillars that update visitors on where they are in the tree are generally ignored. Part of the problem is that displays which highlight the three-fingered hand, the stirrup-shaped stapes, and other seemingly minor features that unify evolutionary groups are not especially compelling. And although I appreciate the wide open and well-lit spaces, I think the design of the halls might be working against the interpretation. It’s hard to tell where one grouping ends and another begins when every surface is either white or made of glass.

Speaking of unhelpful design, there are some bewildering graphic design choices in these halls. On a single graphic, text may switch from center to left to right justification, randomly change in font and/or size, or be interrupted by illustrations placed in the middle of paragraphs. Sometimes paragraphs or even sentences run across multiple surfaces, and some text is printed on the glass barriers in front of fossils, making it even harder to read. I don’t want to harp on this forever so I’ll just link to some more chaotic examples here, here, here, and here.

A corner devoted to the Edentates, which is no longer considered a real evolutionary group. Photo by the author.

Simply put, I’d be very surprised if many visitors are engaging with the phylogenetic organization, or even wondering why the fossils they’re looking at are displayed together. Remember: most visitors come in mixed-aged groups. The trip to the museum is a social experience, and interactions occur among visitors as much as they occur between visitors and the exhibits. The best museums anticipate and meet the needs of these visitors. Too much information, or irrelevant information, is just as bad as too little. I’m all for “broadening horizons” with “challenging” content, but the exhibit needs to be accessible first.

Even if the AMNH fossil halls are pitched above most visitors’ levels of interest, background knowledge, and patience, is the information at least reliable? Much of it is, but phylogeny is inherently volatile, and many groupings (to say nothing of particular genera and species) in the exhibit have been out of date for decades. Visitors in 2024 are being told that tyrannosaurs are a kind of carnosaur (they’re actually coelurosaurs), that pangolins, aardvarks, and sloths form a group called Edentates (they’re actually distantly related), and that primates and rodents are closely related to bats (they’re not). But other groupings in these halls have fared better: the exhibition definitively states that birds are a kind of dinosaur, an idea that enjoys near-universal acceptance today but was reasonably disputable in the early 90s.

Early 20th century tail-draggers. Photo by the author.

On top of the outdated information scattered throughout the halls, about a dozen of the mounted dinosaur skeletons are in old-fashioned, tail-dragging poses. These were known to be inaccurate at the time of the last renovation, but the budget only covered remounting two of them (the Apatosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus).

And just to be exhaustive in covering issues with the existing halls, many paleontologists over the years have discovered that the museum has no easy way to open the large glass cases that house some of AMNH’s most unique and significant fossils. Specimens like the Barosaurus, the Gorgosaurus pair, and the Corythosaurus mummy can only be accessed with the help of hired glaziers, and the museum requires scientists to cover the expense. This is well beyond most research budgets, and as a result, many of these world-famous and one-of-a-kind specimens have not been studied closely in decades.

So it’s fair to ask, why haven’t the AMNH fossil halls been updated yet? To be clear, the museum’s scientific and exhibitions staff are fully aware of everything I mentioned above. I’m sure the biggest hurdle is that a thorough renovation would be really, really expensive. For comparison, the NMNH renovation that took place between 2014 and 2019 cost $110 million ($70 million to restore the century-old east wing and $40 million for the exhibition itself). There’s also the cost in visitation to consider: if AMNH is anything like its peers, a big part of its operating budget comes from visitor admissions (for readers outside the United States, most of our museums are private nonprofits and do not get direct government support). Take away the most popular exhibition in the building for any length of time, and that income drops sharply.

A cast of Tyrannosaurus rex in the AMNH traveling exhibition T. rex: The Ultimate Predator. Photo by the author.

From context clues, I don’t think a top-to-bottom renovation of the permanent fossil halls is coming any time soon. AMNH only recently hired a new fossil reptile curator, Roger Benson, in 2023. And the museum just opened a brand-new wing called the Gilder Center, which took five years and $465 million to build. The museum also just announced that it has temporary custody of Apex, a privately-owned Stegosaurus skeleton. According to a press release, Apex will eventually be the centerpiece of a new passageway connecting the Gilder Center to the permanent fossil halls (the real skeleton until 2028 or so, then a cast). I’d be surprised if we hear anything about a full-scale renovation until after Apex has left the building.

To their credit, the AMNH exhibitions team hasn’t exactly been idle when it comes to dinosaur displays. Over the last two decades, they’ve been rolling out a series of fossil-centric traveling exhibitions, including The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs Among Us, Extreme Mammals, and T. rex: The Ultimate Predator. Each of these temporary shows has been up-to-date with new science and high-tech exhibtry. When the time comes, I’m sure this team could do great work on new permanent fossil galleries.

But for now, what are your hopes for the eventual AMNH renovation? What do you want to see changed or introduced? What should stay the same? Please leave a comment with your ideas!

References

Dingus, L. 1996. Next of Kin: Great Fossils at the American Museum of Natural History. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 

Honan, W.H. 1990. Say Goodbye to the Stuffed Elephants. The New York Times Magazine. 

Solomon, D. 1999. He Turns the Past Into Stories, and the Galleries Fill Up. The New York Times.

Spiegel, A.N., Evans, E.M., Frazier, B., Hazel, A., Tare, M., Gram, W., and Diamond, J. 2012. Changing Museum Visitors’ Conceptions of Evolution. Evolution: Education and Outreach 5:1:43-61.

Torrens, E. and Barahona, A. 2012. Why are Some Evolutionary Trees in Natural History Museums Prone to Being Misinterpreted? Evolution: Education and Outreach 1-25.

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Filed under AMNH, education, exhibits, FMNH, museums, opinion, science communication

November 29, 2024 · 5:00 pm

Some welcome improvements to Deep Time

A look down Deep Time’s main drag. Photo by the author.

It’s no secret that I love Deep Time, the National Museum of Natural History’s recently renovated paleontology hall. From it’s spacious, open aesthetic to it’s narrative that connects charismatic fossils to global environmental change, this is one of the best presentations of the history of life in any medium, bar none. But like any creative project, it’s not perfect. Creating an exhibition on this scale requires the combined efforts of hundreds of individuals, constantly fighting against the realities of budget and time. Inevitably, compromises have to be made. But I’m happy to report that this year, some of Deep Time’s most significant shortcomings has been corrected.

Part of a reading rail near the woolly mammoth and other ice age fossils, as it appeared in 2019. Photo by the author.

Exhibitions of any size have a graphic design “system.” Within the exhibition, there is a limited number of graphic panel types, and each type contains a particular kind of information. Ideally, visitors will understand—consciously or not—what kind of information can be found on what kind of panel. Deep Time makes heavy use of reading rails—long, rectangular panels mounted at an angle in front of specimen displays. These reading rails are all laid out in approximately the same way. There’s a header on the left side (“Bridges Allowed Migration” in the example above) that summarizes the topic of the display. Most of the real estate on each rail is taken up by short paragraphs and images that contextualize the fossils nearby, usually with stories about the time and place they lived in, or the evolutionary lineage they belong to.

Above these contextual stories is a narrow strip that graphically reminds visitors of the time period the display in front of them is concerned with. And above that strip is a white band which identifies the specific fossils on display. Each specimen gets an ID block (sometimes called a tombstone), which lists the common name, scientific name, age, location of discovery, and catalog number. It’s well established from studies of how people use exhibits that ” what is this thing?” is the number one question visitors have at any given time. So it’s good design practice to place the ID blocks in a standardized location that visitors can find at a glance. This is one of many areas where Deep Time is a stellar example of a thoughtfully-constructed exhibition.

The trouble comes from the skeletal diagrams that accompany each ID block (for the tetrapods at least—not all of the fish, invertebrate, and plant fossils have them). The problem isn’t with the quality of the illustrations, which are excellent—I believe all or most of these were drawn by the irreplaceable Scott Hartman. The diagrams are shaded to show which parts of the fossil specimen on display are real and which are reconstructed. As originally designed, real elements were white and reconstructions were gray (see example above). Unfortunately, the color distinction was too subtle. This coupled with the small size of the diagrams (about two inches long) made them basically unusable for their intended purpose. The key included with each diagram—a gray square marked “cast”—was also confusing. I wouldn’t be surprised if many visitors did not even notice that the diagrams were color coded and assumed that the “cast” squares were telling them that every single fossil was a replica.

Close-up of the re-designed ID blocks for Leptomeryx and Poebrotherium. Photo by the author.

At some point between March and November of this year, every graphic panel in the exhibition that includes ID blocks was reprinted with subtle but significant design changes. Each skeletal diagram is now much larger, about twice it’s original size. The reconstructed sections are now yellow instead of gray, and the key beneath each diagram includes two squares: white for real and yellow for cast. This is a tremendous improvement. The intended message of these diagrams—that most of the fossils on display are a mixture of real and reconstructed parts—is much more obvious. And for anyone interested in which particular parts are original fossil, the larger images make that possible.

Close-up of the new schematic drawing of the Hell Creek display. Photo by the author.

In addition to the re-designed skeletal diagrams, new schematic drawings of the displays have been added to many of the rails. These are simple line drawings of the specimens as they appear on exhibit, with numbers that correspond to the ID blocks. Another shortcoming of the original design is that the skeletal diagrams are all in standardized, walking poses, which do not match the often dynamic poses of the mounted skeletons. Although there are numbers associated with the specimens in each display, I imagine many visitors still struggled to match the images on the rail with the fossils in front of them. The schematic drawings help bridge that gap, but there is still an extra step involved. Visitors must match the number of the specimen in the display to the number on the schematic drawing, then match that number to the nearby ID block. I think a better approach might be to create skeletal diagrams with same poses as the mounted skeletons.

Close-up of the new schematic drawing for the Neogene rhino display. Photo by the author.

I noticed one more change to the Deep Time reading rails. Many of the rails throughout the exhibition include a note in the corner that discusses the mix of real and replica fossils on display. This is a common preoccupation for visitors, so it makes sense to address it frequently. However, I was never sure that this recurring text as originally written was really answering the right question.

Are These Fossils Real?

Most of the fossils you see are real, but some are casts. Museum-quality casts and scanned replicas aren’t “fakes.” They’re exact copies of real fossils that capture minute details.

This original text from the 2019 version of the exhibition sounds kind of defensive. And by declaring a distinction between “replica” and “fake,” it’s bringing up a more existential discussion about the reality of physical things than I think most visitors are interested in grappling with. The new 2024 text is much improved:

Why Does the Museum Display Casts?

Some fossils are too fragile for exhibition and must be stored to protect them for further scientific study. The Museum displays exact casts so that you can learn about these fossils, too.

This text better addresses what most visitors are likely concerned with. It establishes that some, but not all, of the fossils on display are replicas. And it clearly states the reason that some of the real fossils in the museum’s possession are not on display. Technically, it doesn’t address the casts of fossils held by other institutions, but given that the idea that museums even have behind-the-scenes collections is news for a plurality of visitors, it’s reasonable not to get too in the weeds.

I want to commend the NMNH team for taking the time to make these improvements. Large museum exhibits are organized and funded as projects with discreet timelines, so it’s often difficult to go back and change things. This means that imperfect exhibits can languish for years or decades, so it’s great to see the museum identifying an issue and addressing it just a few years after opening.

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October 22, 2024 · 2:56 pm

Creating a home for the Chicago Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx banners adorn the Field Museum’s north entrance. Photo by the author.

August 17, 2022. I had just finished a very long drive from Denver to Chicago and wasn’t planning on coming in to the museum that day, but then I heard the news: the fossil was here. The acquisition of the 13th Archaeopteryx by the Field Museum was, by necessity, shrouded in secrecy. There was no reason I needed to know the exact arrival date until the last minute, but I didn’t want to miss the first look at such a historically significant fossil.

That’s how I found myself crammed into the Geology Department’s tiny X-Ray room with a dozen other people. Masks on tight, we all waited with bated breath as Preparator Connie Van Beek pulled up the first images of the slab on the computer. Most of the known Archaeopteryx specimens were commercially prepared before being acquired by museums, but the Field Museum’s new fossil was still sealed in the rock. Aside from the exposed wing feathers—the tell that this was indeed an Archaeopteryx—nobody knew what this block of limestone contained. Would it only preserve the limbs, like the Maxberg and Haarlem specimens, or was there a complete skeleton in there? As we waited for the X-Ray to appear, nobody dared utter the s-word (skull, that is).

Then the image blinked onto the screen. It was a bit faint (these are paper-thin bird bones, after all) but the entire thing was there. Four limbs, a torso, a tail and—folded back in the classic dinosaur death pose—the unmistakable smear of the head and neck. The room erupted into spontaneous applause.

After 1,300 hours of meticulous fossil prep, the Chicago Archaeopteryx is now on display. Photo by the author.

Two years and one month later, the Chicago Archaeopteryx became a permanent resident of Evolving Planet, the Field Museum’s paleontology exhibition. I had the pleasure of serving as the Exhibition Developer for this project, working alongside a brilliant and creative group including Associate Curator Jingmai O’Connor, preparators Akiko Shinya and Connie Van Beek, and all my colleagues in the Exhibitions department. This post is a peek into the thought process behind our new Archaeopteryx display.

Hey, look at me!

A Parasaurolophus-eye view of the Evolving Planet dinosaur hall. Photo by the author.

Once it was decided that the Archaeopteryx should be incorporated into Evolving Planet (rather than being displayed somewhere else in the building) the first order of business was figuring out where exactly to put it. Evolving Planet is arranged chronologically—visitors start at the origin of life 4.5 billion years ago and work their way up to the present. Hailing from the Late Jurassic, Archaeopteryx would need to go somewhere in the central dinosaur hall, which covers both the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. But unlike the rest of the exhibition, the dinosaur hall isn’t strictly chronological. There are multiple competing organization schemes in there—the murals on the walls are in Jurassic and Cretaceous clusters, but the central corrals are arranged by evolutionary groups (except when they’re not). And then there’s the big case of marine fossils that span the entire Mesozoic.

I may have lost some sleep over this. Should Archaeopteryx be near the Jurassic Apatosaurus and Stegosaurus (even though it lived on the other side of the world), or near the other theropod dinosaurs? Or maybe it should be with the marine fossils, since it was found in marine limestone. Ultimately, I realized that there was no perfect way to introduce a substantial new display into a space that had already been renovated multiple times, but it wouldn’t ruin visitors’ experience if Archaeopteryx didn’t fit seamlessly into the established flow.

A replica tree and an animated mural beckon visitors to the Archaeopteryx display. Photo by the author.

There was a more pressing issue influencing where to place Archaeopteryx: the fossil itself is really small. The bird, now splayed across an 18-inch flat slab, is no larger than a pigeon. It may be the most complete Mesozoic dinosaur in the Field Museum’s collection and a contender for the best-preserved Archaeopteryx yet found, but its size makes it easy to overlook alongside a half dozen giant skeletons. When Senior Designer Eric Manabat and I first met to discuss the new project, we immediately agreed that the display would need a physical presence comparable to the other dinosaurs.

With that in mind, we decided the best place for Archaeopteryx was the largest open space in the dinosaur hall. That way, we could maximize the amount of interpretive content surrounding the fossil, and also create displays that would signal to visitors that this was something worth paying attention to.

We propose that our Archaeopteryx may have been swept out to sea in a storm. My headcanon is that this tree was struck by lightning during the same event, and has the scar to prove it. Photo by the author.

As designed, the Archaeopteryx display has two layers of interpretation. The outer ring, visible from anywhere in the dinosaur hall, showcases the world the first bird lived in. A physical Brachyphyllum tree full of Archaeopteryx models stands in the foreground, and an animated backdrop fills in the rest of the Solnhofen habitat (please notice the coniferous branches peeking into the corners of the animation, which are meant to be an extension of the model tree). We used the habitat reconstruction as the “attractor” because visitors frequently cite these immersive recreations as their favorite parts of our paleontology exhibits.

Casts of Caudipteryx, Anchiornis, and others tell the story of how birds continued to evolve after Archaeopteryx. Photo by the author.

Once visitors enter the exhibit space, the focus changes to Archaeopteryx itself: how it died and was preserved, how it fits into our understanding of dinosaur evolution, and what’s special about this particular fossil. We wanted to create an enclosed, intimate space so visitors could get up close to the fossil and admire it’s delicate details. A program of changing lights helps direct attention to features like feathers, teeth, and claws. And for visitors who prefer a tactile experience, we have a touchable copy of the fossil at three times actual size.

Recreating the World

A moment from the animated mural. © Field Museum.

Much like the permanent and traveling SUE exhibitions, a new reconstruction of the star dinosaur was a major part of the Archaeopteryx project. This time, we worked with the animation studio PaleoVisLab to create the definitive Archaeopteryx and a world for it to inhabit. I joined Jingmai O’Connor, Latoya Flowers, Wesley Lethem, and others in weekly meetings with paleontologist Jing Lu and animation lead Heming Zhang for nearly a year as they brought the first bird to life.

The PaleoVisLab team actually created two animations. The first is a simulated “hologram” which illustrates the taphonomic circumstances that resulted in such a perfectly preserved fossil. This animation resides in a pepper’s ghost chamber, designed and built by Latoya and Wesley. It was fun integrating a 160 year-old magic trick into our exhibit, and I appreciate the cosmic coincidence that the pepper’s ghost technique was first popularized within a few years of the discovery of the first Archaeopteryx.

A prototype of the pepper’s ghost chamber. Getting the image to float in space correctly took months of iteration. Photo by the author.

The second, far more daunting animation was the moving mural. We knew we wanted a big, impressive recreation of Archaeopteryx in its world, but we fretted about how it would fit among the century-old Charles Knight murals that adorn the walls of the dinosaur hall. We wanted something that looked dynamic and modern, but it needed to coexist respectfully with the classic oil paintings, and not attempt to overshadow them. I think we managed to toe the line, and the completed piece even has a few nods to Knight’s Solnhofen scene (which is still on display). The pair of Compsognathus in the lower left corner is the most obvious example.

A 3-D printed Archaeopteryx in the early stages of painting. Photo by the author.

Heming could not be restrained from from putting astonishing (one might say insane) amounts of detail into every animal and plant in the scene. I particularly remember the day he turned up for the weekly call and enthusiastically showed us that he had modeled both male and female dragonflies, with hundreds of individual lenses on their compound eyes and even different genitalia. Every creature—from the tiny Homoeosaurus scurrying across the sand to the Aspidorhynchus that jumps out of the water for less than two seconds—was carefully reconstructed from the skeleton up. Naturally, the Archaeopteryx got the most attention. Our model is specifically based on new information gleaned from the Chicago specimen—note the shape of the head in particular.

The physical bird models in and around the tree are 3-D prints of the digital version, which was a new approach for us. This solved a problem we had on the SUE project, where we had different artists simultaneously creating images in different media that somehow had to match. But the 3-D prints also created new challenges: the spindly legs and toes were too fragile to actually hold the model’s weight, so we had to come up with some creative ways to mount them in the tree. Janice Lim constructed the mounts and painted the models so that they perfectly match their animated counterparts. And while I’m shouting out artists, illustrations by Ville Sinkkonen, Gabriel Ugueto, Liam Elward, and Scott Hartman also appear in the exhibit.

These fighting birds poised above the entrance are my favorite part of the exhibit. Photo by the author.

For me at least, the primary goal of the Archaeopteryx display was to get as many visitors excited about this rare fossil as possible. Given that it doesn’t have the size, name recognition, or ferocious appearance of T. rex or Spinosaurus, getting people to pay attention to a little bird with a hard-to-pronounce name wasn’t a sure thing. The solution was to create as many “entry points” as possible. Maybe you’re interested in animals and how they behave. Maybe you’re interested in history, and how our scientific understanding of the world came to be. Maybe your curiosity is activated by seeing something in motion, or by touching things, or by encountering something unique and special. My hope is that whatever interests you bring with you, we’ve created a space where there’s something for you to get excited about.

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October 10, 2024 · 12:40 pm

Past Worlds at NHMU is breathtaking

Gryposaurus makes an impression amidst other dinosaurs in Past Worlds, the NHMU paleontology exhibition. Photo by the author.

I visited the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) earlier this week, and I need to take a moment to applaud its exceptionally beautiful and well-conceived paleontology hall.

NHMU is part of the University of Utah. It resided in its original home on the Salt Lake City campus from 1969 to 2011, when the museum relocated to a new, purpose-built facility in the foothills near Red Butte Canyon. Several design firms contributed to the Rio Tinto Center (the name for the building in which the museum resides), but the permanent exhibitions—including the paleontology hall—are the work of good ol’ Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA). For the unfamiliar, RAA is a dominant player in the field of museum design that is often associated with projects of profound cultural and historic significance, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. RAA has fewer natural history projects in its lengthy catalog of commissions. Near as I can tell, their only other paleontology-centric project was the fourth floor fossil halls at AMNH. I’m not a huge fan of many of the design choices made in those halls, so it’s interesting to see what 20 years and a different client can mean.

Large windows and frequent access to the outdoors are standout features of the NHMU building. Photo by the author.

The 44,000 square feet of permanent exhibitions at NHMU flow linearly across the building’s five floors, which visitors can explore from bottom to top or top to bottom. Conceived as a single experience, the exhibitions don’t feel like discreet units—instead, they flow seamlessly into one another as visitors climb or descend along switchbacking paths through the building. I want to call attention to the design of the museum as a whole because it manages to be both stylish and meaningful. Unlike some other museums with bold architecture (looking at you, ROM), the building manages to make a visual statement without hindering visitor experience or usable exhibit space.

Past Worlds as seen from the Jurassic. Photo by the author.

The paleontology hall—entitled Past Worlds—occupies about half of the total exhibit space, and fittingly it is the first area visitors encounter if they choose to start at the bottom. The hall is open and spacious, but visitors cannot access the entire exhibition at once. Instead, they follow a zigzagging, switchbacking path, with new sight lines opening up as they go. Monumental elements—namely, the dinosaur skeletons, wall murals, and immersive dioramas—are encountered multiple times from different perspectives.

One example is a life-sized diorama of the lake bottom where fossils of the Green River Formation were preserved. Visitors first see this tableau from an “underwater” perspective. Then, some time later, visitors encounter this same scene again, now looking down from the “surface.” Elsewhere, dinosaur skeletons that can be seen from different vantages are interpreted in multiple ways, depending on what else visitors can currently see and compare them to. This series of reveals and payoffs reminds me of the carefully constructed experiential narratives in theme parks, but precisely applied to help visitors learn about ecology and geology. It’s really cool.

Uintatherium and Patriofelis foreground multiple layers of mounted skeletons. Photo by the author.

The hall’s color palate is a mix of earth tones and grayscale. Some of this comes from the mounted skeletons, which range from the charcoal gray of Morrison fossils on one end of the space to brown and beige Cretaceous and Cenozoic fossils on the other. Four giant, vertically oriented murals also contribute to the look and feel of the space. Corresponding to the Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, and Quaternary areas of the hall, these black-and-white murals focus on the flora and landscapes of these eras—you have to look closely to find the animals. I couldn’t find a label identifying the artist, but the murals’ dark foregrounds and bright backgrounds remind me of the original King Kong (or if you want to be fancy, the engravings of Gustav Doré).

Local tyrants Lythronax and Teratophoneus get the most attention, but an obligatory cast of the Wankel/Nation’s T. rex is also present. Photo by the author.

As suggested by the murals, the overall space is arranged chronologically. However, the switchbacking path through the exhibition means that visitors start in the recent past and move back to the Jurassic, before reversing direction and moving forward in time. While a time axis is present, Past Worlds is less about presenting a comprehensive narrative of the history of life and more about zeroing in on a few particular ecosystems that once existed in Utah. These include the Morrison Formation of the Jurassic, the Cedar Mountain, Kaiparowits, and North Horn Formations of the Cretaceous, the Green River Formation of the Paleogene, and the recent Ice Ages. These deep dives into specific habitat groups are relatable, digestible, and easy to contrast with one another and the modern world—indeed, I have been not-so-subtly trying to coax the paleontology exhibits at my own institution in the same direction.

The mounted skeletons have fared well, considering that they’re all in open air and easy to reach. Photo by the author.

Past Worlds features hundreds of fossil specimens, nearly all from Utah or adjacent states. There are more than 40 mounted skeletons, many of which were firsts for me—I’ve never seen a mounted Marshosaurus, Akainacephalus, or Patriofelis before! Notably, all but one of the standing mounts (the Gryposaurus) are casts. This is not due to a lack of material—most of the mounts are based on fossils from NHMU’s collection. Clearly, somebody made the decision to draw a firm line between the real specimens and the dynamic reconstructions—a line that other museums have traditionally blurred. I think it’s fair for some visitors to be disappointed by this, but using casts allows for some lively and energetic displays. The group of Allosaurus swarming a Barosaurus mired in mud is particularly evocative (and incidentally, the way the sauropod’s tail sweeps under the path and curls overhead is so cool). Besides, there are plenty of real fossils to see, many of which are very strikingly displayed. I was impressed by an in situ hadrosaur skeleton under the floor, which seamlessly merges with a vertical case of Kaiparowits fossils that appears to be rising out of the ground.

I’m not sure how easy this is for scientists to access, but it sure looks neat. Photo by the author.

Individual labels are commendably brief, and tie each fossil to the larger stories being told. I was pleasantly surprised that the ID lists the discoverer and the preparator of each fossil, when known. Most labels also include a skeletal diagram showing where individual bones fit into the larger skeleton, but these were frustratingly small and almost impossible to make out (a problem shared with similar graphics at NMNH).

There are plenty of touchable displays, but media is used sparingly. A highlight is a four-part program in which scientists propose different possible causes for the Cleveland-Lloyd assemblage of Jurassic fossils. Visitors are then prompted to vote on which hypothesis is most convincing. The program is several minutes long, but visitors appeared to be staying for the entire thing, and causing a traffic bottleneck in the process.

As you can assuredly tell, I was extremely impressed by NHMU. Meaningful design and a thoughtful approach to visitor experience combine with accessible interpretation and some extraordinary fossils to create a truly outstanding example of a natural history exhibition.

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