August 3, 2026 · 4:52 pm

Two museums, two exhibits, one story

“Twin films” is a term that refers to a pair of movies released by different studios around the same time, which have similar plots or are inspired by the same source material. Museums will likewise produce “twin exhibits” from time to time. There was T. rex: The Ultimate Predator and SUE: The T. rex Experience in 2019 and 2020. Then there was Wild Color and The Nature of Color in 2021. And in 2025, we had After the Age of Dinosaurs and Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs (okay, maybe this is just an AMNH and Field Museum phenomenon). As with twin films, there is seldom reason to assume something nefarious is going on with twin exhibits. Often, certain ideas are in the zeitgeist, and that leads institutions with similar missions to take on comparable projects.

Twin exhibits provide a fascinating opportunity to look at how two creative teams approached the the same set of problems. After the Age of Dinosaurs (hereafter AAD) and Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs (hereafter Impact) are both roughly 8,000 square foot temporary exhibitions about the end-Cretaceous mass extinction and the recovery period that followed. In some ways, they are uncanny in their resemblance to one another. But more often, these two exhibits demonstrate the breadth of ways a single story can be told.

A minimalist Coryphodon in AAD’s “New Giants” gallery.
The dramatic title treatment at the entrance to Impact.

To be clear, this post will not offer a fair comparison. I was co-developer of AAD, which means I worked on shaping the narrative and visitor experience, as well as writing the text in the second half of the exhibit. I know how our creative process unfolded and when compromises had to be made. I don’t have any comparable insight into Impact’s creation, so I’ll either be relying on public statements and interviews or just guessing at that team’s intentions. But if anyone who worked on Impact happens to read this, I’d love to hear from you!

Origins

I had heard discussion about what would become AAD as far back as 2019. Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t always an exhibit about fossils. The concept originated with the Field Museum’s contemporary biologists, who thought an exhibit about the early Paleogene would be interesting because that time was the divergence point for so many of the taxonomic groups found today. From legumes to lichen-forming fungi to passerine birds, much of the Earth’s present-day diversity can be traced to the first few million years after the end-Cretaceous extinction.

Early in AAD, visitors pass through a tunnel visualizing the regrowth of forests after the mass extinction.
AAD dedicates significant floorspace to the story of plants.

An exhibit about how the natural world we know today came to be is a great pitch. The problem was that most of the relevant biological research happens in the realm of genetics and molecules. There really isn’t much you can show, other than a lot of images of people hunched over lab benches. An exhibit is a visual and experiential medium, and it was hard to imagine an exhibit about Paleogene evolutionary radiations that didn’t involve reconstructions of extinct animals and past ecosystems. And that ultimately meant that the exhibit team spent a lot more time talking to paleontologists than to biologists.

According to Lauri Halderman, recently-retired Vice President for Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, the origin of Impact was a bit more straightforward. “We did some interviews with our visitors on our dinosaur floor,” Halderman said in an interview with Adam Savage. “Every kid knows [how the dinosaurs went extinct]. They have no idea what happened in the oceans. That’s an opportunity for us. They only know a slice of the story.” The AMNH team noticed a deficiency in visitor understanding—exactly how the asteroid impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of a new world order—and created a new exhibit to address it.

A Triceratops uproots a tree in Impact’s largest diorama.
The shark Striatolamia is a highlight of this display exploring how oceans fared after the end-Cretaceous extinction.

I think there’s a subtle but important distinction here. The seed of Impact was the mass extinction—a cataclysmic and destructive scar on the biological and geological history of the planet. AAD, meanwhile, was conceived as a story about the recovery—an example of life’s steadfast resilience. Both exhibits tell both parts of the story, but there’s a difference in perspective that carries through to the final products. Impact feels more like a cautionary tale, while AAD is more celebratory.

Scope

A major decision both exhibit teams had to make was how to bookend the story: what’s the starting point, and what’s the end point? AAD opens with the mass extinction. In the introductory media piece, visitors see dinosaurs thriving for all of five seconds before the asteroid blows up the world (or as lead developer Marie Georg once put it, “the world got shot.” The asteroid wasn’t very big compared to Earth, but like a bullet hitting a body, it’s effects on global systems were violent and long-lasting). In contrast, the first gallery of Impact—about 30% of the exhibit—is about life in the Cretaceous. A massive, intricate diorama breaks down the variety of living things present in Montana before the extinction, while life-sized models of a mosasaur and plesiosaur hint at the diversity in the oceans. Only then are visitors ushered into a theater, where they watch a media piece about how the devastation played out.

While they occur at different points in the overall experience, there are uncanny similarities between the extinction theaters in both exhibits. In AAD and Impact, visitors enter an enclosed space with open seating and a large projection screen. And in both exhibits, a countdown timer encourages visitors to wait until the presentation begins again, rather then entering partway through. On the other hand, the AAD video is a tight two minutes and thirty seconds, with constant motion and action on screen. In Impact, the video lasts three times as long, and is more of a slideshow with occasional animated elements. The AAD version also uses hyper-stylized visuals animated by Rachel Oftedahl, while the imagery in Impact’s video is more realistic.

An early scene in the AAD extinction theater.
The extinction theater in Impact.

Just as important as where to begin the story is where to end it. For the AAD team, our focus was on the recovery from the mass extinction, but at what point was the Earth truly “recovered?” Early in development, we considered featuring the entirety of the Paleogene Period, which lasted from 66 to 23 million years ago. This was motivated at least in part by a desire to see more of the Field Museum’s extensive collection of mammal fossils from the northern Great Plains on display. Ultimately though, it made more sense for the Green River ecosystem (another Field Museum collection strength) to serve as the exhibit’s “finale.” Hailing from about 52 million years ago, the Green River Formation preserves a tremendous variety of mostly small fossils in incredible detail. This was a healthy, thriving ecosystem, and by this point in time life on Earth had definitively bounced back. But we still snuck a few of those later Paleogene fossils (a uintathere, a brontothere, a nimravid, and Andrewsarchus) into a coda that summarizes everything that happened between the Green River and the present day.

This gallery about the Green River Formation serves as AAD’s finale.
AAD’s coda rapidly brings visitors back to the present by showing highlights at five million year intervals.

Rather than highlighting any particular ecosystem, displays in the back half of Impact look at the origins of specific groups of animals, including rodents, bats, and whales. A colossal Paraceratherium (reused from Extreme Mammals, a previous AMNH traveling exhibit) is a visual counterpoint to the Triceratops in the first gallery. One might conclude that in this telling, the return of giant land animals heralds a fully recovered world, although this is not stated explicitly.

After the Paraceratherium, Impact wraps up with a number of small displays. Topics covered include the rise of grasslands, human origins, and the other mass extinctions in Earth’s history. A final tableau represents the diversity of life today with taxidermy specimens, models, and videos. Again, I am not an impartial observer, but given how carefully Impact situates itself in time at the beginning of the exhibit, I found these concluding displays narratively disjointed. Rather than picking a precise endpoint to its story, it seems to dissolve into several loose threads unbound by time or place.

This life-sized Paraceratherium is a showstopper.
Loosely connected displays at the end of Impact.

Between the Cretaceous and the present day, AAD and Impact touch on many of the same topics and ideas. Both exhibits explore which groups of organisms survived the extinction, and why. Both cover the short-lived domination of ferns under ash-covered skies, followed by the spread of rainforests that were more complex than any that came before. And both look at how unexpected animals grew to giant sizes in the aftermath of the extinction, with Titanoboa getting special mention.

Unique to AAD is a section about how scientists can learn about when species diverged by studying modern DNA (a nod to the exhibit’s origins). I also think AAD does more to emphasize the role of climate in shaping evolution and ecology. This is clearest in the coda gallery, where the hall changes from red to blue to emphasize how the climate cooled and dried over time. Credit to the Impact team for including a display about how scientists and governments are working to prevent any future asteroid impacts. The AAD team never even considered that, but it serves an important purpose. As Halderman explained, “we don’t want kids to go home thinking ‘I’m going to hide under the bed tonight because maybe another asteroid is going to hit.'” I definitely see the value in assuring visitors that death by asteroid isn’t something they need to fret about. Especially since both exhibits make it clear that anthropogenic climate change is something we’re all going to have to deal with.

Style

AAD is a very distinctive-looking exhibit, and that was no accident. Early on, 3D designer Sarah Daley and graphic designer Jason Gagovski made the connection between the early Paleogene—a world of giant birds and tiny horses where nothing is as it seems—and Alice in Wonderland. They imagined a psychedelic storybook atmosphere to compliment the often strange and surprising narrative, and they had the perfect artist in mind to help realize that vision.

Jay Ryan is a screenprinter and poster artist who works out of Skokie, in the Chicago suburbs. His whimsical, pop art-influenced illustrations have graced album covers and posters for bands like the Flaming Lips and the Breeders. Although Ryan had never done scientifically accurate work for a museum before, the multitude of squirrels, raccoons, and mammoths that grace his portfolio gave him a solid head start. AAD ended up being the biggest assignment of Ryan’s career to date, calling for six large murals and about fifty individual animal illustrations.

Oversized mammal teeth and pink walls complement Jay Ryan’s playful Plesiadapis mural.
My personal favorite of Ryan’s murals, in which Coryphodon chases Diatryma away from its watering hole.

The look, feel, and design language of AAD all coalesced around Ryan’s art. Aside from giving the exhibit a fun and unconventional style, Ryan’s art helped emphasize the essential strangeness of the early Paleogene. For example, I feel like the stylized illustrations of Palaeosinopa and Coryphodon better convey that these animals have no living descendants than photo-realistic images (that could be dismissed as similar to otters and hippos) would have. And while Ryan didn’t work on the end-Cretaceous extinction animation, the style he helped establish ironically allowed us to portray the end of the dinosaurs more accurately. Scenes of landscapes erupting into flame and entire forests being washed away by tidal waves would have been pretty horrific to portray in a realistic style, but became more palatable as cut-out silhouettes.

Impact’s graphic panels tend to have a lot going on at once.
Tylosaurus (with caiman lizard colors) and Terminonatator battle in the Cretaceous seas.

At the risk of sounding less than collegial, I think AMNH’s temporary and traveling exhibits all tend to look very similar. They’re characteristically dark, with mostly black graphics and furniture. They are visually dense, with lots of little captions, photos, charts, and asides dancing around on every panel. Personally, I think they look a bit cluttered, and are occasionally overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start reading, and it’s hard to find the main point of a particular display when there are so many different bits of text. Impact is fairly typical in this regard.

However, I was absolutely spellbound by the spectacular array of life-sized models that the AMNH team created for Impact. Well over a dozen species are represented, often by several individuals. And many of the models, like the aforementioned Triceratops and Paraceratherium, are enormous. Jake Adams, Jason Broughman, Celeste Carballo, and Rebecca Meah made up the in-house team that created this menagerie, and the exhibit is worth seeing for their work alone.

Jay Ryan’s Titanoboa, at life size with an animated scale bar.
Impact’s post-extinction diorama, featuring what’s left of Triceratops.

Although they are stylistically distinct, the Jay Ryan illustrations in AAD and the monumental models and dioramas in Impact both seem to be responses to the same set of challenges. Most fossils from the early Paleogene are not especially showy. Excluding lagerstätten like the Green River Formation, they tend to be small and fragmentary remains. Some of the most informative fossils are pollen grains and individual teeth, which are hard to turn into an impressive display. So in order to help visitors understand the story being told, both museums leaned heavily on the created rather than the authentic aspects of natural history exhibition (for anyone counting, AAD includes around 50 fossils, white Impact has just three).

This is hardly a new phenomenon, and exhibit creators have long recognized the value of artificial displays to convey true-to-life stories. The pendulum has swung back and forth over the decades: it’s a valid point that authentic collections are what make museums unique, but it’s also true that immersive experiences and art in the service of science have always been features of natural history museums. The immersive Van Gogh exhibits that peaked in popularity a few years ago were a major talking point in museum circles, not because they had anything to say but because they were enormously popular in spite of being little more than big projections of out-of-copyright art. Experiences are in vogue—the challenge is to create experiences that tell stories worth telling. Experiences with a point.

For what it’s worth, I think AAD and Impact both excel at being experiences with a point. They bring to life a little-known era in Earth’s history, and showcase what that time can teach us about the challenges we face in our world today.

A shoutout to the dozens of colleagues who contributed to (and share authorship of) After the Age of Dinosaurs—your knowledge and skill astonishes me every day. Any mistakes or mischaracterizations of their work are my own.

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Filed under AMNH, exhibits, FMNH, mammals, museums, opinion, paleoart

March 31, 2026 · 3:34 pm

A primer on the Sternbergs

Charles H. Sternberg with a brontothere. © University Archives, Fort Hays State University

The Sternbergs were, in all likelihood, the most talented bunch of fossil hunters that ever lived. Charles Hazelius Sternberg—later joined by his sons George, Levi, and Charles Mortram Sternberg—built a reputation among turn-of-the-century museum leaders as men who could find any fossil they were asked for. From the 1870s to the 1970s, they steadily filled the halls of museums across the United States, Canada, and western Europe with spectacular skeletons of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, and more, many of which remain the best examples of their taxa. If you’ve visited any large natural history museum in the western hemisphere, chances are you’ve seen a Sternberg specimen. Still, it’s a challenge to keep all those Sternbergs straight, so this post is an overview of who was where, and when.

Charles H. Sternberg grew up near Cooperstown, New York in a religious household led by his minster father. The family relocated to western Kansas in 1867. Then a teenager, Charles H. learned of the ancient fish and marine reptile fossils around his new home at Fort Hays from his older brother, George Miller Sternberg. While George M. dabbled in collecting and identifying fossils, he was already busy as a medical doctor and a major in the United States Army. He would go on to be Surgeon General and make great strides in establishing cures for typhoid, yellow fever, and tuberculosis. It would therefore fall on Charles H. to make fossil hunting his life’s work.

Mosasaurs collected by Charles H. Sternberg (top right and bottom) on display at the London Natural History Museum. Photo by the author.

In 1870, Charles H. sent a package of fossil leaves he had collected to the Smithsonian Institution, hoping to find a buyer. Assistant Secretary Spencer Baird replied with a note of appreciation, but made no offer for remuneration. A decade layer, Charles H. recognized his fossil leaves illustrated in a scientific journal with no credit to him. The experience foreshadowed what a career as a fossil hunter for hire would be like, but Charles H. was not deterred. As he would later write in his first memoir, he was by that point determined “to collect facts from the crust of the Earth so that men might learn more of the introduction and succession of life on our Earth.”

Over the subsequent decade, Charles H. built himself a reputation as a skilled collector. With a recommendation letter from George M., he was hired to collect fossil leaves for Leo Lesquereaux of the American Philosophical Society. By 1876, he was working for Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Charles was soon Cope’s right hand man in the field. Together, they invented the process of securing fossils for transport by wrapping them in a “jacket” of plaster-soaked burlap—a technique that is still used today.

Xiphactinus at the Yale Peabody Museum, collected by George F. Sternberg in 1932. Photo by the author.

Charles H. married Anna Reynolds in 1880. As his client list grew to include Yale, Harvard, the British Museum (now the London Natural History Museum), and other institutions, he settled into something like a routine. Summers were spent chasing fossils across Kansas and neighboring states for various clients, while winters were spent in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife (and writing to prospective clients to secure work for the following field season). Charles and Anna had four children over the next few years. George Fryer Sternberg was born in 1883. Charles Mortram Sternberg was next in 1885, followed by Maud in 1890 and Levi in 1895.

Earning a living finding fossils for museums was hard work. Charles H. moved from gig to gig, often with multiple employers in a single season. He lived for months out of the year at remote campsites only accessible by horseback. In 1892, Anna tried accompanying her husband in the field with young George and Charles M. in tow (Maud stayed in Lawrence with her grandmother). While nine-year-old George found a nearly complete plesiosaur, Anna decided that field life was not for her.

Charles H. with his three young sons and two unidentified men, circa 1906. © University Archives, Fort Hays State University

By 1897, George and Charles M. (then aged 14 and 12) were regular hands on their father’s expeditions. And just like their father, they could apparently smell fossilized bone. Among other innovations, the Sternbergs built a tripodal pulley rig for hoisting plaster jackets out of the ground—a far cry from Charles H.’s early years, when he was prying out individual bones with a butcher knife. In addition to finding fossils on demand, the Sternbergs also accumulated a growing backlog of fossils for sale. Since the family business was never incorporated, records of what they had in inventory at any given time are sparse.

Charles H. (left) and George (right) use their pulley lift to move a jacketed ceratopsian skeleton. Image © University Archives, Fort Hays State University.

In 1908, the Sternbergs found what is arguably their most famous fossil. By that time, they had shifted their focus from the marine fossils of Kansas’s Niobrara Formation to late Cretaceous dinosaurs of Wyoming’s Lance Formation. In late August, George and Levi (now 13) were removing sandstone overburden from a promising site while Charles H. and Charles M. took the wagon on a supply run. It soon became clear to the brothers that they had an articulated dinosaur skeleton lying on its back. Excavating further, George uncovered the unmistakable texture of scaly reptile skin across the animal’s chest—likely the first fossilized dinosaur skin ever found. Although they had nothing but potatoes left to eat, George and Levi stayed by the fossil and continued to excavate for two days until their father and brother returned.

The skeleton—an Edmontosaurus—turned out to be almost entirely wrapped in skin, like a hardened, wet sack draped over the bones. Charles H. told George that it was the most incredible fossil he had ever seen, and later wrote in his memoir that he knew the moment he saw it that it was time for his son to take the lead in the family business. Word of the find made it to Henry Osborn, who immediately sent a representative to buy it for the American Museum of Natural History. The Edmontosaurus “mummy” (as Obsorn called it) was fully prepared and on display within two years, and is still revealing new information about the life appearance of dinosaurs to this day.

The Edmontosaurus mummy on display at AMNH. Photo by the author.

1911 was an eventful year for the Sternbergs. Charles H. and George embarked eastward to visit the big east coast museums for the first time. They saw the Edmontosaurus mummy on display at AMNH, as well as plenty of their other finds at the Carnegie Museum, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Harvard Comparative Zoology Museum, and the National Museum of Natural History. They also observed how museum preparators Adam Hermann and Arthur Coggeshall were restoring incomplete specimens and mounting them on custom armatures. The Sternbergs would go on to offer these services as part of their trade.

Meanwhile, Charles M. married Myrtle Martin and built a homestead in Wyoming. Even as the Sternbergs began taking separate commissions and working together less frequently, they could still regroup for dinners at Charlie and Myrtle’s whenever they traveled through the area. The news that year wasn’t all happy, however: Maud Sternberg passed away at age 20 after a long illness.

Juvenile Gorgosaurus collected by Charles H. Sternberg and purchased by AMNH. Photo by the author.

Late in 1911, George was hired to join the AMNH’s Barnum Brown, who had been collecting dinosaurs along Alberta’s Red Deer River since the previous year. While Joseph Tyrell had pioneered fossil hunting in that region in the 1880s, Brown’s team was revealing just what a treasure trove of fossils was hidden in those hills. Nevertheless, many Canadians were concerned about how much of their natural heritage was being taken away and shipped to New York, so Reginald Brock of the Geological Survey of Canada organized a competing expedition in 1912. Who could lead such an expedition and promise comparable success to Barnum Brown? The natural choice was Charles H. Sternberg.

With Charles M. and Levi at his side, Charles H. got to work hunting for dinosaurs not far from where Brown was working. The two teams were generally friendly with one another, spending their leisure time together and even sharing Sunday picnics. Charles H. was also able to learn the basics of operating along the Red Deer River from the AMNH crew. A floating barge made for a convenient mobile base camp, but face nets were mandatory to protect from the incessant biting insects. The biggest inconvenience was the need to move water and supplies from the river to the fossil quarries (and fossils back to the river)—often a multi-mile trek over uneven terrain.

George Sternberg (left) drives a wagon carrying hadrosaur fossils from a quarry back to the river. Image © Field Museum.

Despite these challenges, both teams managed to find, excavate, jacket, and transport around 30 dinosaur specimens every year, for three years straight. Brown wrapped things up in Alberta at the end of 1915, but George and Charles M. continued working for the Geological Survey for several years. Charles H. and Levi also remained in Canada, freelancing for the British Museum in the summer of 1916.

Charles H. collected 45 boxes of fossils that season, including three reasonably complete hadrosaur skeletons. Those fossils were loaded onto the S.S. Mount Temple for transport to London, but they never made it. The ship was intercepted and boarded by a German surface raider, and its crew and passengers taken prisoner (not killed, as Sternberg wrote in his memoir). The Germans then placed explosive charges on the ship and sank it. All of the Mount Temple‘s cargo—including thousands of pounds of food and provisions, 700 horses, and the aforementioned fossils—were lost at the bottom of the north Atlantic. Experiments have shown that mineralized fossils aren’t seriously harmed by immersion in salt water, so there’s every reason to think those hadrosaurs are doing fine down there. If any billionaires happen to read this and want to fund something dramatic in the name of science, you could do far worse than rescuing the lost dinosaur skeletons on the wreck of the Mount Temple (it’s at 46° 43’ N, 34° 8’ W).

Parasaurolophus collected by Levi Sternberg in 1920, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo by the author.

Starting in the 1920s, the Sternberg clan began to settle down. Charles H. relocated to California with Anna in 1921 after being hired as Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum. His final field seasons were spent in the American southwest, collecting dinosaurs in New Mexico and Baja California. Charles M. stayed in Canada, taking a job as lead paleontologist for the Geological Survey in 1919. He became a curator at the National Museum of Canada in 1948, where he continued to study and publish on Canadian dinosaurs. Meanwhile, Levi moved to Toronto with his young family and worked at the Royal Ontario Museum for several decades, first as a preparator and eventually as Associate Curator. After Anna passed away in 1938, Charles H. moved in with Levi until his death in 1950.

George, however, continued the life of the freelance fossil hunter for a bit longer. He collected for a number of institutions, including a four-year stint with the Field Museum starting in 1922. Working with the Field’s Elmer Riggs, George traveled to Argentina and Bolivia to collect ground sloths and other Cenozoic mammals.

Homalodotherium skeleton collected by George Sternberg in Argentina. Image © Field Museum

In 1927, George decided to return to Hays, Kansas, where his father started collecting fossils some sixty years earlier. He began teaching at Fort Hays State University, and helped found a natural history museum there. When George passed away in 1969, that museum was renamed the Sternberg Museum of Natural History to honor the remarkable Sternberg family and their contributions to our understanding of past worlds.

References

Graham, M.R. 2019. Professional fossil preparators at the British Museum (Natural History), 1843–1990. Archives of Natural History 46:2.

Rogers, K. The Sternberg Fossil Hunters: A Dinosaur Dynasty. Missoula, Montana, 1991: Mountain Press Publishing Company.

Sternberg, C.H. 1909. The Life of a Fossil Hunter. 

Sternberg, C.H. 1917. Hunting Dinosaurs in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada.

Tanke, D.H. and Currie, P.J. 2009. A history of Albertosaurus discoveries in Alberta, Canada. Canadian Journal of Earth Science 47:1197–1211.

Tanke, D.H., Hermes, N.L., and Guldberg, T.E. 2001. The 1916 Sinking of the SS Mount Temple: Historical Perspectives on a Unique Aspect of Alberta’s Paleontological Heritage. Canadian Palaeobiology. 

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Filed under AMNH, field work, FMNH, history of science, museums, NHM, NMNH, YPM

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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