Category Archives: FMNH

March 8, 2016 · 1:39 pm

History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 2

Start with History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 1.

Where we left off, the fossil exhibits in Halls 37 and 38 at the Field Museum of Natural History had gone for decades without more than piecemeal improvements. In the meantime, the field of paleontology – and our understanding of dinosaurs in particular – had progressed by leaps and bounds. What’s more, standards for natural history exhibits had changed. Cases of specimens with esoteric labels written by curators past were no longer enough. Visitors expected exhibits that were relatable and accessible for children as well as interested adults, and multimedia and interactive elements had become standard. This combined with ever-growing public interest in all things prehistoric gave Field Museum staff serious incentive to start with a clean slate.

Phase III: Life Over Time

The end of the old fossil halls came not with a bang but with a whimper. In 1990, specimens started disappearing and areas were roped off without warning. Hundreds of specimens were relocated to Halls 25, 26, and 29 on the other side of the second floor, where they would be part of the exhaustive new exhibit “Life Over Time.” Meanwhile, Halls 37 and 38 became the home of the pacific islands exhibit and Ruatepupuke II, the Maori Meeting House.

Remounted Daspletosaurus in Life Over Time, then labeled Albertosaurus. Photo courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

As the name suggests, Life Over Time was a chronological journey through the history of life, from its origins around four billion years ago up to the last ice ages. Paleobotanist Peter Crane chaired the Geology Department during the development period, and geologist and children’s education specialist Eric Gyllenhaall oversaw the contractors and in-house staff that created the the exhibit itself. In total, the project took five years and cost $7 million.

Gyllenhaal and the rest of the team conceived of Life Over Time as a directed experience. The space was shaped like a U, with switch-backing corridors flanking a more open dinosaur section in the middle. With the exception of a shortcut between the Carboniferous and the Mesozoic, visitors had no choice but to walk through the exhibit chronologically, viewing the displays in the order the designers mandated. Since visitors tend to be more focused and more likely to read signs early in the exhibit, the designers deliberately used the introductory rooms to cover the most unfamiliar concepts. Displays on the origins of life and the evolution of aerobic respiration made up the “homework” part of the exhibit. After that, visitors were set free in the Mesozoic section, where open sight lines allowed people to choose what they wished to view, and in what order. This served as a reward for putting up with the more challenging material early on. Ultimately, what set Life Over Time apart from its predecessors was the focus on ideas rather than specimens. The fossils were meant to illustrate broader concepts like adaptation, extinction, and biogeography, and were in some ways subordinate to the hands-on activities and multimedia displays.

This cast of the AMNH Triceratops was a new addition to Life Over Time. Photo by Gary Todd.

In Life Over Time, visitors circled the dinosaurs on an elevated ramp before visiting them at ground level. Photo by Erik Peterson.

The process of developing Life Over Time was an occasionally tense give-and-take between the research staff (who traditionally had the last word on exhibit content) and the administrators, exhibit specialists, and educators (who had greater influence this time around). Looking back, it would seem that the curators lost more of these fights than they won. Life Over Time ended up with a decidedly kitschy tone, and was full of overtly silly elements. The exhibit entrance featured carnival-style banners advertising “Primordial Ooze” and “Dunkleosteus: Jaws of Death.” Further on, a mannequin dressed as a game show host invited visitors to spin the “Wheel of Adaptation.” There were Dial-A-Dinosaur phones, which visitors could pick up and listen to first-person accounts of life as a dinosaur. An animatronic puppet show explained the switch from aerobic to anaerobic life. Video “weather reports” with CBS anchor Bill Kurtis updated visitors on climate change over time. There was even a ridable trilobite on a spring.

This carnival-like atmosphere is particularly distinctive when compared to the present fossil halls at the American Museum of Natural History, which were developed at the same time. AMNH project director Lowell Dingus rejected contemporary trends in exhibit design, which, in his view, were pitched to “the lowest common denominator of visitor intellect.” Wishing to challenge audiences to think about fossils the way scientists do, Dingus created a phylogeny-based exhibit that emphasized empiricism and rigorous anatomical analysis over idle speculation. While it was certainly not devoid of informative content, Life Over Time was designed for a much younger audience, with particular attention paid to the under-five set. This marked contrast between the New York and Chicago exhibits speaks volumes about the differing influence of the scientific staff at the two museums, as well as the institutions’ overall priorities at the time.

Postcard of the pelycosaur cluster in Life Over Time. These specimens were donated by the University of Chicago in the 1960s.

Happily, the Field Museum didn’t opt to replace its authentic mounted fossil skeletons with the roaring robots that were in vogue at the time. The classic fossil mounts were restored and rebuilt by Prehistoric Animal Structures, Inc., a Canadian company headed by Gilles Danis. A biologist by training and a veteran of the Royal Tyrell Museum, Danis led the process of disassembling, cleaning, and remaking the most significant mounts. The Apatosaurus, Daspletosaurus, and Megathierum were all given more accurate and active poses: the Daspletosaurus now crouched over its Lambeosaurus prey with its tail held aloft, while the giant sloth stretched to its full height against a replica tree. Although it was completely rebuilt, the Apatosaurus retained its dragging tail in the new exhibit – an unusual choice for a 1990s reconstruction.

In addition to the classic mounts, Life Over Time featured a partial Parasaurolophus and a new cast of the AMNH Triceratops. The most substantial addition was a complete Brachiosaurus reconstruction. This 40 foot tall mount combined casts taken from the material Elmer Riggs collected at the turn of the century with sculpted elements prepared by Stephen Godfry. Far too large for the second floor exhibit halls, the Brachiosaurus earned a place of honor in the central Stanley Field Hall. In order to comply with the fire code while allowing visitors to walk under the towering sauropod, the torso was extended by adding two extra dorsal vertebrae (for a total of twelve). In an amusing twist, newer research shows that this vertebrae count – and the mount’s stretch limo proportions – is probably correct.

The Brachiosaurus skeleton was tall enough to look over the second floor mezzanine. Source

Life Over Time opened to the public in June 1994 (the Brachiosaurus had been on display for a year prior). Nevertheless, it was the shortest-lived iteration of the Field Museum’s fossil displays, closing down after only ten years. Why didn’t it last? For one thing, the numerous interactive elements suffered more wear and tear than expected, and they broke frequently. Meanwhile, in-house evaluations showed that the exhibit’s intended messages were not coming across to most visitors. For example, Asma recalls a child frantically spinning the Wheel of Adaptation with all his might, completely oblivious to the information the display was meant to convey. Unfortunately, an interactive exhibit is not necessarily an educational one, and it can be very difficult to create a learning experience that accomplishes both goals.

Phase IV: Evolving Planet

There was one more reason the Field Museum needed to revisit its fossil displays: the sudden acquisition of Sue the Tyrannosaurus in 1997. The story of the four-way legal battle that preceded this has been told often (although not always fairly), so suffice it to say that few came out of that fight unscathed. The Field Museum entered the picture when landowner Maurice Williams, to whom the courts had awarded ownership of Sue, announced that the fossils would be placed on the auction block. Paleontologists initially worried that the priceless specimen would disappear into the hands of a wealthy collector, or end up in a crass display at a Las Vegas casino. Those fears were put to rest when the Field Museum won Sue with financial backing from McDonald’s and Disney. Including the auctioneer’s commission, the price was an astounding $8.36 million.

Some obscure theropod. Photo by the author.

The Field Museum committed to a summer 2000 unveiling of Sue’s mounted skeleton. However, most of the bones was still buried in rock and plaster. The fossils had to be prepared and stabilized before they could be studied, and they had to be studied before they could be mounted. Most of this work was done on-site, in view of the public. The armature itself was created by Phil Fraley Productions, the same exhibit company that rebuilt the AMNH Tyrannosaurus. Field Museum administrators decided that Sue would replace the Brachiosaurus in the Stanley Field Hall, even though the sauropod had only been on display for seven years. According to Exhibit Project Manager Janet Hong, Sue was such a monumental exhibit that it really deserved pride of place. Meanwhile, the Brachiosaurus was relocated to O’Hare International Airport, while a weather-proof duplicate was placed outside the museum.

Sue was revealed to the public on May 17, 2000 with the literal raising of a curtain. A week-long series of celebrations and press junkets introduced Sue to Chicago, and it has been one of the city’s biggest attractions every since. All the publicity paid off, at least in the short term: Field Museum attendance soared that year from 1.6 million to 2.4 million. 16 years later, Sue’s new identity as a Chicago landmark seems to have all but eclipsed the legal dispute that was its original source of fame. Hong likens Sue to Chicago’s David, and even former Field Museum President John McCarter feels that he underestimated what a force Sue would be for the city.

Map of Evolving Planet. Source

The acquisition of Sue created a strong public association between the Field Museum and dinosaur research. This was ironic, because while the museum had hosted a talented array of paleontologists over the years, it had never employed a dinosaur specialist. Even Elmer Riggs, who collected the museum’s iconic sauropods at the turn of the century, was more interested in mammal evolution. In 2001, the Field Museum began a concerted effort to expand its vertebrate paleontology program, and make a name for itself as a hub for dinosaur science. Among the new hires were fossil preparator Akiko Shinya and paleontologist Peter Makovicky, who immediately began organizing expeditions to grow the museum’s collection.

The new emphasis on paleontology research brought greater expectations for the Field Museum’s interpretive efforts, and Life Over Time wasn’t doing the job. The initial plan was to merely refresh the decade-old exhibits, but ambitions grew and the renovation snowballed into something much more substantial. Project Manager Todd Tubutis and Content Specialist Richard Kissel spent five years overseeing the development of Life Over Time’s replacement, eventually titled “Evolving Planet.”

Once we reach the Permian, the fossils can start to speak for themselves. Photo by the author.

Each section of Evolving Planet is differentiated by its own color palate and ambient audio. In the Permian, olive green walls and signs are accompanied by the sounds of a windswept desert. Photo by the author.

Yes, of course this series needs another picture of the Apatosaurus. Photo by the author.

While the new exhibit uses the same space and directed, U-shaped layout as its predecessor, the end result is virtually unrecognizable. The hokey parts of Life Over Time are gone, replaced by all-new signs, labels, and interactives. New specimens include original Parasaurolophus, Rapetosaurus, and Arctodus mounts, plus casts of Stegosaurus and Deinonychus, all prepared by Research Casting International. An entire room is dedicated to fossils from Utah’s Green River Formation, acquired on a recent Field Museum collecting expedition. Phlesh Bubble Studios provided a panoramic CGI reconstruction of the Burgess Shale Fauna, while Karen Carr produced 150 original paintings to supplement the classic Charles Knight murals. These, in turn, were restored by Parma Conservation and are contextualized as the historic masterpieces they are. Nevertheless, Evolving Planet has a few holdovers from Life Over Time. The existing dinosaur mounts were not moved or changed, and major set pieces like the walk-through Carboniferous swamp diorama remain in place.

Timeline moments and consistent iconography

Repeating iconography keeps visitors engaged in story of life on Earth. Photo by the author.

Karen Carr art fills in gaps in classic Knight pieces

New artwork by Karen Carr fills gaps left by the classic Charles Knight murals. Photo by the author.

The interpretation in Evolving Planet arose from three main objectives. First, the exhibit needed to highlight the Field Museum’s own collections and the work of its in-house research staff. Second, it had to contextualize Sue and the environment they lived in. Finally, it had to effectively explain the process of evolution, and the evidence for it. Life Over Time had faltered here, and with the influence of the anti-science lobby increasing, it was crucial to get it right. Tubutis and Kissel accomplished this in part by facilitating closer collaboration between the exhibit designers and research staff. Evolving Planet weaves the evidence for evolution into all aspects of the displays. The first thing visitors see is the thesis of the exhibit – “everything that has ever lived is connected through and is the result of evolution” – printed on an otherwise blank wall. Moving forward, visitors learn how evolution via natural selection works, and how we know. Along the way, common misconceptions, such as the idea that lineages improve over time, or that evolution is “just a theory”, are proactively addressed and corrected.

The visual design of Evolving Planet deserves particular mention. The new exhibit subtly but effectively uses repeating iconography to guide visitors through the story being told. Every geological period is associated with a specific color scheme and soundscape, making visitors’ progression from one stage to another obvious and distinct. “Timeline Moments” at the beginning of each section update visitors on their progress, and ensure that they expect to see something new and different up ahead. Special symbols remind visitors of recurring themes, such as mass extinctions (or even the repeated evolution of saber-teeth). Lastly, variations in font and text size are cleverly employed to call attention to key words and phrases.

old riggs mounts, new sloth, charles knight

A new pose and context for Megatherium, along with historic Riggs mounts and Knight artwork. Photo by the author.

Evolving Planet opened on March 10, 2006. A decade later, this award-winning exhibition remains a favorite with scientists and educators alike. As Cleveland Museum of Natural History Educator Ashley Hall explains:

Evolving Planet is my all-time favorite museum exhibit. It is not only rich with some of the world’s best known fossil specimens, but provides label copy for visitors of all learning levels. You can visit multiple times and still learn something new. Museums provide visitors with unique settings for learning, and it is a museum’s job not to short-change, dumb down, or simplify information. Evolving Planet hits the nail on the head.

From its clear-as-day thesis to its poignant finish (a counter showing the number of species going extinct daily), Evolving Planet is ambitious but uncommonly relatable. It places familiar dinosaurs and mammoths in a broader evolutionary context, introducing visitors to the true breadth of deep time. And yet, the exhibit is also remarkable for its restraint. It doesn’t overwhelm casual visitors with specimens and facts, but instead sticks to a handful of broadly-applicable themes.

The Field Museum’s paleontology program spent its early years playing catch-up to peer institutions. While other American natural history museums were conducting yearly fossil-collecting expeditions and building collections of one-of-a-kind specimens, the Field Museum’s founding paleontologists struggled for basic resources and recognition within their institution. Today, the department’s public showroom is what Kissell describes as “one of, if not the, most comprehensive explanations of the history of life on Earth in any museum.” It would seem that the Field Museum has found its voice in the pantheon of great natural history museums.

Many thanks to Ashley Hall, Olivier Rieppel, Bill Simpson, and Devin Myers for sharing their time, expertise, and experiences when I was writing this post. Any factual errors are, of course, my own.

References

Asma, S.T. 2001. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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

Fiffer, S. 2000. Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. rex ever Found. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.

Glut, D.F. 2001. Remembering the Field Museum’s Hall 38. Jurassic Classics: A Collection of Saurian Essays and Mesozoic Musings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Lee, B.M. 2005. The Business of Dinosaurs: The Chicago Field Museum’s Nonprofit Enterprise. Unpublished thesis, George Washington University.

Lelièvre, M A. 2006. Evolving Planet: Constructing the Culture of Science at Chicago’s Field Museum. Anthropologica 48: 2: 293-296.

Milner, R. 2012. Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. New York, NY: Abrams.

Tubitis, T.J. 2005. Revitalizing Life Over Time: A New Look for a Very Old Topic. In the Field 76: 2: 18.

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Filed under dinosaurs, education, exhibits, FMNH, fossil mounts, history of science, paleoart

Tagged as exhibits, field museum, fossil mounts, museums, natural history museums, paleoart, paleontology, science communication

January 7, 2016 · 2:23 pm

History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 1

The Field Museum of Natural History (variously known as the Field Colombian Museum and the Chicago Museum of Natural History) was founded by wealthy philanthropists in the wake of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It has since expanded into one of the largest natural history museums in the world, a destination attraction and a hub for ongoing research. What follows is a summary of the historic paleontology exhibits at the Field Museum – when and how they expanded and changed, when major specimens were added, and who spearheaded these efforts.

As with my previous overviews of fossil exhibits at AMNH and NMNH, please note that I will not be discussing field expeditions or research by museum staff in any detail, as these topics are well-explored elsewhere (see Paul Brinkman’s extensive work, for starters). My primary interest here is in the public-facing exhibits, and the people who created them.

Phase I: The Field Columbian Museum

The World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893, principally as a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Lasting six months and attended by 27 million people, the Exposition was monumental in size and scope. Years before it even opened, there was talk about using the Exposition displays to seed a new museum, which would rival the great natural history museums in New York and Washington, DC. Eager to establish an enduring cultural attraction in their city, a group of wealthy Chicagoans – including Marshall Field, who donated an unprecedented $1 million – contributed the necessary funds to buy up many of the Exposition’s exhibits and found the Field Columbian Museum.

As the largest and most elegant of the 200 temporary buildings constructed for the Exposition, the Palace of Fine Arts became the Field Museum’s home. Frederick Skiff served as the first director, acting as an intermediary between the board of trustees and the new curatorial staff, who would manage the collections and assemble the exhibits. Skiff hired geologist Oliver Farrington to curate the earth science collections, a diverse mix of minerals, gems, meteorites, fossils, and fabricated displays purchased from the Henry Ward Natural Sciences Establishment. With thousands of specimens to catalog, Farrington was soon overwhelmed. He repeatedly asked Skiff to hire a paleontology specialist to support him, but the board (composed of the businessmen who founded the museum) was uninterested in paying more salaries or acquiring new specimens.

The model icthyosaur and thousands of fossils in cases were among the specimens purchased from the Ward Natural Sciences Establishment after the World’s Columbian Exposition. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

When the Field Columbian Museum opened on June 2nd, 1894, most the 5,000-piece fossil collection was on public display. In addition to the cases of as-yet unlabled invertebrates, plants, and other small fossils, the exhibit included several large reconstructions of prehistoric animals. As of opening day, a life reconstruction of a mammoth stood in the west court, while skeletons of Megaloceros, Scistopleurum, Megatherium, Hadrosaurus, and a uintathere stood in halls 35 and 36. With the exception of the Megaloceros, these were all replicas of mounts from other institutions. The Hadrosaurus in particular was woefully outdated, considered by contemporary scholars to have “long since ceased to have any value except as a historic attempt” (Beecher 1901).

After completing his catalog of the earth science collections in 1896, Farrington continued to lobby for a dedicated staff paleontologist. The board paid no attention until 1897, when the American Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History announced ambitious plans to scour the western interior for fossils. So began what Brinkman calls the second Jurassic dinosaur rush – a frenzied race among leading American museums to be the first to collect and mount a sauropod dinosaur. Not wanting to be left behind by peer institutions, the trustees approved the conditional hiring of Elmer Riggs to collect dinosaurs for the Field Museum.

Hadrosaurus cast on display at the Field Museum. Field Museum Photo Archives.

Hadrosaurus stands among other fossil casts in the Field Columbian Museum. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

Riggs and his classmate Barnum Brown cut their teeth in paleontology while studying under Samuel Wendell Williston at the University of Kansas. The two young men took part in an AMNH collecting expedition in 1896. Brown, who had quit his studies to work for the museum, quickly became a favorite at AMNH. Concerned about his own future, Riggs sent an unsolicited letter to Frederick Skiff, offering his skills as a fossil collector and preparator. The letter crossed Skiff’s desk at an opportune time, and in the summer of 1898 Riggs was paid a small stipend for a trial collecting trip with Farrington. The expedition was a success, and Riggs was hired as an Assistant Curator before the end of the year.

Riggs’ first three collecting seasons with the Field Museum were enormously successful. In addition to the holotype of Brachiosaurus, at the time the largest known dinosaur, Riggs collected a very-well-preserved back end of an Apatosaurus near Fruita, Colorado. Nevertheless, AMNH won the sauropod race when they completed their composite “Brontosaurus” mount in 1905. The Carnegie Museum had a Diplodocus on display in 1907, and was busy cranking out casts for European heads of state. While Riggs’ Apatosaurus was more complete than any single specimen the other museums had recovered, it was still only half a dinosaur. Riggs and Farrington repeatedly lobbied the board for funding to find more sauropod material with which to complete the skeleton, but the trustees had moved on to other things.

Riggs' Apatosaurus mount stood unfinished from 1908-1958. Photo from the Field Museum Library.

Riggs’ Apatosaurus mount stood unfinished from 1908-1958. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

Plans were afoot to move the Field Museum to a new lakefront campus. However, when legal issues halted progress on the new building, Riggs was granted permission to mount the partial Apatosaurus in hall 35. The plaster casts previously displayed in this space were discarded, and unfortunately are now lost to history. A gas furnace was installed on the museum grounds, which Riggs and his small team used to shape massive steel I-beams for use in the armature. The teetering sauropod hindquarters was unveiled in 1908, but if Riggs hoped that the museum administrators would want to complete the mount once they saw how absurd the incomplete skeleton looked, he was out of luck.

Indeed, the years that followed were among the most frustrating of Riggs’ career. He received no funding to collect fossils after 1910, and could only look on enviously at the thriving paleontology research and exhibit programs at AMNH and the Carnegie Museum. The institutions in New York and Pittsburgh were headed by paleontologists, and bankrolled by wealthy fossil enthusiasts like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. By comparison, the Field Museum was controlled by trustees with seemingly little interest in paleontology. Already paid less than the museum’s other curators, Farrington and Riggs were left with meager resources and little to do until the 1920s.

Phase II: Halls 37 and 38

The Palace of Fine Arts was intended to last six months, and after ten years it was in dire shape. The roof leaked constantly, putting exhibits and collections in danger, and fences had to be placed around the perimeter to protect visitors from falling brick. Before his death in 1906, Marshall Field worked with architect Daniel Burnham to design a new home for the museum. It took years to settle disputes over where to place the building, but ground was eventually broken off Lake Shore Drive in 1915. Completed in 1920, the new Field Museum of Natural History was a gleaming marble fortress, decorated inside and out with intricate neoclassical reliefs and statuary.

In the spirit of a classic cabinet of curiosity, some of the cases in Hall 37 contained over a thousand specimens apiece. Source

Exhibits and collections were transported by rail car, often without being removed from their display cases. Earth science exhibits found a new home on the west side of the upper level. Hall 37, an east-west facing gallery accessible directly off the west mezzanine, housed invertebrate and plant fossils. Hall 38, running north to south against the far west side of the building, contained vertebrate fossils. Although it was colloquially known as the “dinosaur hall”, this space never contained many dinosaurs. In the 1920s, the only dinosaurs to be found were the half-Apatosaurus, a Triceratops skull, an articulated “Morosaurus” (Camarasaurus) limb, and parts of Brachiosaurus. The bulk of the specimens on display were Cenozoic mammals, including horses, rhinos, camelids, and a mammoth and mastodon. There was also a life-sized “coal swamp” diorama behind a glass barrier, with large model insects suspended in flight.

This comparatively modest exhibit was expanded significantly between 1922 and 1927, when Elmer Riggs was once again able to collect fossils in the field. Thanks to a bequest from Marshall Field’s grandson, Riggs traveled to Alberta, Argentina, and Bolivia, securing many unique specimens along the way. These included several new species, like the marsupial cat Thylacosmilus and the predatory bird Andalgalornis. A colossal Megatherium Riggs recovered in Argentina was immediately mounted for display, and became one of the most memorable elements of Hall 38.

A postcard of the partial Apatosaurus at the south end of Hall 38. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

A postcard of the north end of Hall 38, featuring a South American giant sloth and other Cenozoic mammals.

Megatherium at the north end of Hall 38. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

Hall 38 also boasted a spectacular set of murals by Charles Knight. The undisputed master of paleontological reconstructions and wildlife art, Knight had a long working relationship with Henry Osborn, president of AMNH. Osborn had commissioned Knight to create many large and small paintings for his museum’s fossil exhibits, but the two frequently argued over Knight’s remuneration. For years, Osborn and Knight discussed a series of immense wall canvases illustrating the entire history of life. Osborn could never get the money together, however, and Knight refused to produce any concept sketches for fear that they would be turned over to a less-skilled artist. In 1926, the Field Museum’s board of trustees asked for a meeting with Knight about an identical project for their new fossil hall. The initial discussion did not go well, and Knight walked out when the trustees started making “suggestions” about the content, color, and composition of the proposed artwork. Knight was very talented, but also very particular. He gladly accepted anatomical expertise from scientists but would not suffer meddling with the artistic aspects of his work. Fortunately for both parties, Knight’s daughter/manager Lucy intervened, securing her father the biggest commission of his career.

Knight completed 28 murals for the Field Museum, the largest of them measuring 25 feet long and nine feet high. Subjects ranged from the Proterozoic primordial soup to an iconic standoff between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. These images were not only painstakingly researched reconstructions based on the latest fossil evidence, they were (and still are) gorgeous works of art in their own right. With Knight’s murals in place, the Field Museum finally had a world-class paleontology exhibit.

The mastodon in Hall 38, with fossil horses visible beyond. Image courtesy of the Field Museum Photo Archives.

Gorgo in Stanley Field Hall. Photo courtesy of Field Museum Photo Archives.

“Gorgosaurus” in the Stanley Field Hall. Photo courtesy of Field Museum Photo Archives.

Riggs retired in 1942, leaving paleontology at the Field Museum to the next generation, among them Eugene Richardson, Brian Patterson, and Orville Gilpin. In 1951, Richardson oversaw a thorough modernization of Hall 37. The number of specimens on display was drastically reduced, making room for more accessible explanations of the fossils and ten new dioramas of Paleozoic marine life. The resulting exhibit was one of the most comprehensive displays of fossil invertebrates in the world.

Although virtually no dinosaur research was done at the Field Museum between 1910 and the late 1990s, the 1950s saw the acquisition of two significant specimens for the benefit of the visiting public. In 1956, preparator Orville Gilpin assembled a Daspletosaurus (then called Gorgosaurus) for the central Stanley Field Hall. The skeleton was a surplus specimen from Barnum Brown’s years collecting along Alberta’s Red Deer River, and trustee Louis Ware spearheaded the effort to buy it from AMNH. Since the Daspletosaurus was acquired explicitly for display, Gilpin opted to skewer and otherwise permanently damage many of bones for the sake of an unobstructed, free-standing mount. In the mid 20th century, dinosaur fossils were thought of as display pieces first, and irreplaceable specimens second.

The newly-finished Apatosaurus serves as a backdrop for an educational video shoot. Source

Two years after installing the Daspletosaurus, Gilpin finally completed Riggs’ partial Apatosaurus in Hall 38. When Edward Holt announced that he had discovered the front half of a sauropod near Green River, Utah, the Field Museum purchased the rights to excavate and display the find. Gilpin added the new fossils to the existing mount without dismantling Riggs’ heavy-duty armature. Relabeled “Brontosaurus” and erroneously given a casted Camarasaurus skull, the refreshed sauropod debuted in April 1958 – half a century after Riggs started the project.

The next three decades saw occasional piecemeal additions to the fossil halls. For example, the University of Chicago donated its entire geology collection to the Field Museum in 1965. This included a unique assortment of Permian amphibians and synapsids from the red beds of central Texas, many of them holotypes. Field Museum preparators remounted several of these specimens and integrated them into the exhibits. Nevertheless, Hall 38 never received a complete overhaul, and by the late 1980s it was quite dated. Not only were the fossil mounts in stiff, tail-dragging poses, but the stilted label copy written by curators past did not meet modern expectations for natural history exhibits. Even the vibrant Charles Knight murals looked tired behind years of accumulated dust and dirt. In short, the Field Museum was long overdue for a total re-imaging of its paleontology displays.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the Field Museum’s fossil exhibits from the 1990s onward. Stay tuned!

References

Beecher, C.E. 1901. The reconstruction of a Cretaceous dinosaur, Claosaurus annectens Marsh. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. 11: 311-324.

Brinkman, P.D. 2000. Establishing Vertebrate Paleontology at Chicago’s Field Colombian Museum: 1893-1898. Archives of Natural History 27: 1: 81-114.

Brinkman, P.D. 2o10. The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the 20th Century. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Chicago Natural History Museum Bulletin. (March 1956). 27: 3.

Gilpin, O.L. 1959. A Freestanding Mount of Gorgosaurus. Curator 2: 2: 162-168.

Glut, D.F. 2001. Remembering the Field Museum’s Hall 38. Jurassic Classics: A Collection of Saurian Essays and Mesozoic Musings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Lelièvre, M A. 2006. Evolving Planet: Constructing the Culture of Science at Chicago’s Field Museum. Anthropologica 48: 2: 293-296.

Milner, R. 2012. Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. New York, NY: Abrams.

Tubitis, T.J. 2005. Revitalizing Life Over Time: A New Look for a Very Old Topic. In the Field 76: 2: 18.

Williams, P.M. 1968. The Burham Plan and the Field Museum. Bulletin of the Field Museum of Natural History 39: 5: 8-12.

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Filed under dinosaurs, exhibits, FMNH, fossil mounts, history of science, mammals, museums, reptiles, sauropods

Tagged as dinosaurs, Elmer Riggs, exhibits, field museum, fossil mounts, fossils, natural history museums, paleontology

July 10, 2015 · 12:13 pm

Framing Fossil Exhibits: Environmental Change

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about the strengths and weaknesses of various large-scale paleontology exhibits from an educational standpoint. Check out the Introduction, Walk Through Time, Phylogeny, and Habitat Immersion posts if you’d like to catch up. I’ll wrap up this series for the time being with a look at two upcoming renovations of classic fossil displays, which appear to have converged on similar aesthetic, organizational, and interpretive approaches.

First up is the Peabody Museum of Natural History, where the Great Hall of Dinosaurs and adjacent Hall of Mammal Evolution have seen little modification since the 1950s. While the PMNH fossil galleries are fascinating as a time capsule of mid-century exhibit design, much of the content is rather dated and a thorough overhaul is sorely needed. PMNH staff started planning for the renovation in 2010, and I highly recommend Collections Manager Chris Norris’s blog posts on the process. Once the basic layout and concepts were in order, the museum hired the architectural firm Studio Joseph to prepare the images being used to promote the project. Fundraising is now underway, but an estimated completion date has yet to be announced.

Conceptual render of the Great Hall of Dinosaurs by Studio Joseph. Source

The big idea behind the new exhibit is the dynamic relationship between the biosphere and the Earth’s various other spheres (atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, etc). The evolution of life on Earth did not occur in a vacuum, but as part of a continuously changing global system. This narrative does have a time axis – visitors will travel from the Permian at one end of the exhibit to the Quaternary at the other – but the precise divisions of geologic time are de-emphasized in favor of the broad environmental transitions that triggered evolutionary innovations. Examples might include the separation of continents during the Mesozoic, the diversification of flowering plants in the Cretaceous, or the massive climatic shift at the end of the Eocene. In this context, it’s more important that visitors understand (for example) that the Cenozoic was generally a transition from hot and wet to cold and dry (and the implications on mammalian evolution) than that they know the names and time spans of each epoch.

This approach contrasts sharply with traditional chronological exhibits, such as the Field Museum of Natural History’s “Evolving Planet.” The FMNH fossil galleries are extremely linear, and each geologic period is introduced with a set of easily-digested bullet points summarizing what happened during that time. Relatively tight spaces prevent visitors from seeing specimens from other time periods prematurely, and the galleries devoted to each period are color-coded to make them immediately distinct. According to Norris, this segmented presentation of the history of life obscures the large-scale transitions which transcend the somewhat arbitrary divisions of geologic time. As such, the new PMNH fossil halls will present the narrative holistically, encouraging visitors to track the underlying environmental trends that precipitated evolutionary change over time.

mammal hall concept art by Studio Joseph

Conceptual render of the Hall of Mammals by Studio Joseph. Source

As is immediately clear from the promotional images, the new exhibit will juxtapose a modern, wide-open aesthetic with elements of the museum’s past – specifically, the outdated but gorgeous Rudolph Zallinger murals. Both of these design elements tie directly to exhibit’s narrative themes. By breaking up the central dinosaur pedestal and eliminating the unsightly glass cases in the Mammal Hall, the exhibit designers have dramatically increased the available floor space and opened up new lines of sight. This should allow visitors to view each of the galleries comprehensively, rather than as a series of discreet segments. Meanwhile, the Zallinger murals will remain a celebrated part of the exhibits. These magnificent frescoes were painted between 1942 and 1967, and are among the most iconic images of prehistoric life ever created. Although the physiology of some of the animals is outdated, Zallinger was in other ways ahead of his time. Rather than giving the geologic periods hard borders, Zallinger artfully wove the sections together so that each one fades imperceptibly into the next. The viewer can see that the flora, fauna, and climate are changing over time, but it’s a gradient, not a ladder, which perfectly reflects the narrative of the new exhibit.

A conceptual render of Deinonychus and other Cretaceous fossils. Source

About 300 miles south of PMNH, the re-imagining of the fossil halls at the National Museum of Natural History is well underway. This building’s east wing has been home to paleontology displays since it opened in 1910 and has been updated several times, but this is the first time it has undergone a complete, wall-to-wall modernization. The old exhibits were formally closed on April 28th, 2014, and NMNH staff spent the following year removing thousands of specimens from the halls. With the fossils out of the way, the next step will be to restore the historic space to its original neoclassical glory. After that, the new exhibits and updated fossil mounts can be assembled in time for a 2019 re-opening.

Intriguingly, the planned design of the new National Fossil Hall is both thematically and aesthetically similar to the PMNH renovation, albeit on a grander scale. The National Fossil Hall’s narrative focus will be on large-scale environmental transitions over time, and how these changes drove the evolution of plants and animals. Like at PMNH, this will be accentuated by an open layout: false walls and barriers that have divided the space since the early 1960s will come down, allowing visitors to see clear across the spacious three-story hall. This airy aesthetic hearkens back to the Hall of Extinct Monsters, and like the restoration of the Zallinger murals at PMNH it represents an admirable celebration of the institution’s history.

Early conceptual render of the National Fossil Hall by Reich + Petch Source

One interpretive choice that will set the National Fossil Hall apart is the clustering of specimens on islands, or “pork chops”, as the were called early in development. Each pork chop represents North America at a particular period in time. While anchored by a few charismatic mounts, the pork chops will also include all manner of small animals, invertebrates, and plants that were part of that environment. In this way, the islands are self-contained mini exhibits, each one showing a complete ecosystem that existed at a particular time. Moving among the these displays, visitors should get a sense of how climate change and faunal interchange (among other phenomena) can completely transform an ecosystem over millions of years. They’ll also learn how certain organisms, like sauropods in the Jurassic or grass in the Neogene, can change landscapes and influence the evolution of contemporary plants and animals.

The emphasis on open spaces and freedom of movement is notable, because this is quite different from the linear exhibits of the late 20th century. In recent decades, exhibits have become increasingly structured, with specific learning goals and physical spaces designed to corral visitors through a carefully orchestrated narrative journey. Again, Evolving Planet at FMNH is an excellent example of this philosophy. The new National Fossil Hall is in some ways a push in the opposite direction – although it has a clear narrative and overarching message, visitors can roam through the exhibit as they please. I see the pork chop system as a way to have it both ways. Whether visitors work through the exhibit front to back or run straight to the T. rex in the center of the hall, then wander around at random, they’ll still be able to compare and contrast the different ecosystems and learn what the designers want them to learn.

Early concept art of the Jurassic “pork chop.” Image from The Last American Dinosaurs, NMNH.

More than anything else, what I expect to set the National Fossil Hall apart from peer exhibits will be its explicit connections to modern-day environmental crises. It’s worth quoting the Department of Paleobiology’s summary in full:

Visitors to the Museum will be able to explore how life, environments, and ecosystems have interacted to form and change our planet over billions of years. By discovering and harnessing the tools and methods paleobiologists use to study fossils, visitors will gain a deeper understanding of how the world works.

The distant past affects all of us today and will continue to do so in the future. How will climate change impact the natural world and our daily lives? How can we make informed choices about our ecosystems as individuals and as a species? How can we all become informed citizens of a changing planet?

We are in the midst of an extinction event of our own making. Anthropogenic climate change, habitat destruction, and invasive species are as dangerous as any asteroid, and will likely have profound effects on our own lives and livelihoods in the coming century. But while humans are undeniably the cause of the latest round of global changes, we also have the power to mitigate and manage their consequences. The study of fossils provides important contextual information – we can place modern organisms in an evolutionary context and understand their role in shaping the world as we know it, and we can see how organisms have responded to significant environmental overhauls in the distant past. The fossil record is in fact the only way to directly observe these things (as opposed to relying on models or actualistic experiments). As such, the new National Fossil Hall will make it clear that paleontology isn’t just about historical curiosity. The study of past life gives us a long view of the Earth’s biotic and abiotic systems, and helps us predict how they will respond to today’s environmental changes.

Concept drawing of the National Fossil Hall’s Cretaceous zone. In the old hall, the viewer would be standing at the base of the mezzanine stairs facing the rotunda. Source

With the modern climate crisis front and center, the new National Fossil Hall has the potential to be one of the most immediately relevant and important paleontology exhibits ever assembled*. This is significant, because as I lamented when I started this series, immediacy and relevance are not things that most museum visitors expect from fossil displays. While fossils, particularly the mounted skeletons of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, have been central to the identity of natural history museums since the late 19th century, most visitors don’t regard these exhibits as anything more than prehistoric pageantry. Visitor surveys consistently reveal that dinosaurs are seen as eye candy – monsters that might as well be from another planet. This is a shame, because dinosaurs and other prehistoric organisms were real parts of our own world, and we can learn much from them.

The new National Fossil Hall will be arranged in reverse chronological order – as visitors move accross the gallery, familiar elements of modern environments will be stripped away and the world will become an increasingly alien place. Source

And so we come full circle. What is the point of a museum exhibit**? Is it enough to provide visitors an opportunity to see cool objects and specimens? When we ask museumgoers what they want to see, they tell us “dinosaurs” or “fossils.” They don’t ask for compelling narratives or connections to big contemporary issues, and they don’t see their museum visit as an important way to bridge gaps in scientific literacy.

Still, it is of critical importance that we provide these narratives and connections. Even if we accept the fact that the very existence of a museum and the chance to see real specimens is a Good Thing, museums are still accountable to the public. Virtually all museums cite education as the primary purpose of their institution, and it’s imperative to live up to that. A museum should have a learning goal in mind, it should be able to prove that this message is coming across, and it should be able to articulate why its audience is better off for it. This is not necessarily easy – exhibits need to be relevant without being condescending or preachy. Exhibit designers need to understand their visitors as much as their content. They need to find a balance between feeding visitors information and providing a customizable experience for diverse audiences. As we have seen, not every exhibit succeeds, but my impression is that we’re getting better at it.

*It’s also notable that this climate change-focused exhibit will be on the national mall, given the ongoing politically-motivated opposition to climate science.

**Note that I’m referring specifically to public-facing exhibits. There are many good reasons why the ongoing maintenance of natural history collections is intrinsically valuable.

References

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

Weil, S.E. (2002). Making Musueums Matter. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

Werning, S. (2013). Why Paleontology Is Relevant. The Integrative Paleontologists. http://blogs.plos.org/paleo/2013/02/19/why-paleontology-is-relevant

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Filed under dinosaurs, education, exhibits, FMNH, museums, NMNH, opinion, PMNH, science communication

Tagged as education, evolution, exhibits, Extinct Monsters, museums, natural history museums, NMNH, paleontology, Peabody Museum, science communication, scientific literacy, Smithsonian

February 26, 2015 · 11:51 am

Framing Fossil Exhibits: Phylogeny

This is the third part of an on-again, off-again series about organizational and interpretive approaches in large-scale paleontology exhibits (see the introduction and walk through time entries). This time, I’ll be discussing exhibits arranged according to phylogenetics – that is, the evolutionary relationships among living things. Natural history museums have displayed specimens according to their place on the tree of life since the days of Charles Wilson Peale, and more than any other organizational scheme, phylogeny is the way biologists think about the living world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this arrangement was more common in the past, when exhibits were typically designed by and for experts. Examples of these old-school displays include the fossil mammal gallery at the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the paleontology halls at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum (neither has been thoroughly overhauled since the 1950s).

The jargon-heavy signage in the Peabody Museum’s classic fossil mammal exhibit is probably ignored by most visitors. Photo by the author.

Modern natural history museums rarely attempt phylogenetic exhibits. In vertebrate paleontology, an understanding of the evolutionary relationships of animals as identified via minute anatomical details is fundamental to our science. However, most people simply don’t think about the world in this way. For example, I was halfway through my first semester teaching an undergraduate anatomy course when I realized that most of the class didn’t really understand what a mammal is. The students were familiar with the word “mammal” and could provide some examples, but they couldn’t articulate what sets mammals apart from other animals, and the relationship of mammals to other vertebrates within the tree of life was all new to them. It’s easy to forget that even the most basic elements of evolutionary classification are specialized knowledge, even among biology students.

Describing the history of life on Earth chronologically is relatively easy—museum visitors intuitively understand the forward progression of time. But scientific classification (as opposed to colloquial categorization) requires a lot of explanation up front, and it’s easy to overwhelm an audience with jargon. While not impossible (see Neil Shubin’s masterful Your Inner Fish), it is very difficult to explain phylogeny to a general audience in a relatable and approachable way.

In 1995, the American Museum of Natural History attempted to do just that with the most recent renovation of its historic 4th floor fossil halls. This evolutionary arrangement was a major change for AMNH, since this space had a “walk through time” layout for most of the 20th century. In the accompanying book Discovering Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, curators Norell, Gaffney, and Dingus explain that phylogenetics (and the cladistic methodology in particular) is the only way to approach the study of prehistoric life in an objective way. Patterns of evolutionary relationships revealed by cladistic analyses are hard evidence in a field of study traditionally characterized by idle speculation. Norell and colleagues argue that the new exhibit arrangement shows visitors the credibility and scientific rigor behind modern paleontology.

Map of the fossil halls on the 4th floor of AMNH. Source

Communicating the rigorous and trustworthy nature of scientific conclusions is a worthy goal, and the choice to ground the AMNH exhibit in this way seems almost prophetic given the litany of speculation-heavy paleontology “documentaries” that have proliferated in the years since it opened. Scientific rigor is definitely a running theme here – sign after sign explains that popularly depicted dinosaur behaviors like parental care and pack-hunting are largely untestable speculation. To a degree, this label copy takes the fun out of an undeniably fun subject, but I can appreciate the effort to legitimize paleontological science in the public eye. Overall, the AMNH exhibits represent an attempt to train visitors to look at fossils the way scientists do, and the phylogenetic layout is central to that goal.

In the exhibit, visitors are meant to walk through a cladogram of chordates. You’ll pass through large halls dedicated to broad groups like saurischian dinosaurs and advanced mammals, while visiting smaller cul-de-sacs that represent narrower clades like ornithomimids and testudines. A central black path guides you through the evolution of life, and centrally-situated pillars along your route identify major evolutionary innovations, such as jaws or the ability to reproduce on land. The insanely comprehensive vertebrate fossil collections at AMNH make this institution uniquely capable of putting so much diversity on display (although non-tetrapods are woefully underrepresented). Meanwhile, an open floor plan allows you to spend as much or as little time in each area as you wish, and ample natural lighting goes a long way toward making it possible to study specimens in detail.

Pillars mark major evolutionary milestones in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. Photo by the author.

The evolutionary pathway becomes considerably less obvious among the dinosaurs. Photo by the author.

Nevertheless, I agree with Riley Black that the AMNH fossil halls don’t do the best job communicating the story of vertebrate evolution to their core audience. The underlying purpose of any exhibit structure is to provide meaning and context for objects – to help visitors see them as more than neat things to look at. According to visitor surveys, the default mode of understanding for most people passing through a paleontology exhibit is what I’ve been calling “dinosaur pageantry.” After seeing the exhibit, most visitors will recall a list of cool skeletons they saw. A few might consider which ones are meat-eaters and which ones are plant-eaters, but without further prompting that’s all we can usually expect from non-specialists. It’s the museum’s job to give visitors the intellectual tools to contextualize those fossils in a more sophisticated way, but there’s a fine line to walk. Provide too little information and nobody learns anything, but provide too much and the content is ignored. Unfortunately, the AMNH exhibits fall into the “overkill” category.

As discussed, phylogeny is complicated, often counter-intuitive, and largely unfamiliar to many visitors. To overcome this, the AMNH designers rely on a fairly long orientation film, which introduces the concept of categorizing organisms based on shared derived characteristics. There are a few problems with this. First there’s the film itself, which dives right into the traits that characterize different groups – like the stirrup-shaped stapes of derived mammals and the temporal fenestrae of archosaurs – without explaining why these traits are significant. To a layperson, these probably seem like really inconsequential things to hang a whole group on. The video also presents a cladogram of vertebrates without explaining how to read it. As Torrens and Barahona demonstrate, interpreting a phylogenetic tree is a specialized skill that many natural history museum visitors lack. Second, I saw no incentive or instruction to actually start my visit to the 4th floor in the orientation hall. There are no less than four entrances to the fossil exhibits, so many visitors won’t know there is an orientation film (I sure didn’t) until they’re halfway through the galleries. Finally, there’s the reliance on media in general: do we really want visitors to spend even a portion of their time in an exhibit full of real fossils watching a video in a darkened room? Telling visitors what to think in a narrated video is easy, but it’s not nearly as meaningful as showing them the same concept with specimens (or better yet, coaxing them to reach conclusions themselves).

Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, American Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author.

Iconic mounts in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs are iconic. Photo by the author.

Within the actual fossil halls, interpretation remains stubbornly unapproachable. For example, the sign introducing proboscidians tells visitors that this group is defined primarily by eye sockets located near the snout. An observant visitor might wonder why scientists rely on such an obscure detail, as opposed to the obvious trunks and tusks. There’s a good teaching moment there concerning why some characteristics might face more selection pressure (and thus change more radically) than others, but instead visitors are only offered esoteric statements. Relatedly, the exhibit does little to prioritize information. Most label text is quite small, and there’s a lot of it. Compare this to Evolving Planet at the Field Museum, where there is a clear hierarchy of headings and sub-headings. Visitors can read the main point of a display without even stopping, and parents can quickly find relevant information to answer their charges’ questions (rather than making something up).

Evolving Planet also compares favorably to the AMNH fossil halls in its informative aesthetics and spatial logic. At FMNH, walls and signs in each section are distinctly color-coded, making transitions obvious and intuitive. Likewise, consistent iconography – such as the mass extinction zones – helps visitors match recurring themes and topics throughout the exhibit. AMNH, in contrast, has a uniform glass and white-walled Apple Store aesthetic. It’s visually appealing, but doesn’t do much to help visitors navigate the space in a meaningful way.

Phylogenetic interpretations change quickly – Edentata is no longer considered a natural group. Photo by the author.

The phylogenetic layout introduces a number of other unique interpretive challenges. Since there is no temporal axis, it’s often unclear whether the lineage in a particular cul-de-sac cluster went extinct, continued on, or gave rise to another group elsewhere in the exhibit. Visitors that want to know which animals lived contemporaneously are out of luck. Meanwhile, the exhibit sometimes uses modern animal skeletons to fill out displays where fossil examples are limited, such as bats and primates. While these are labeled, the text is too small to be seen from a distance. The evolutionary organization is also burdened by the fact that phylogenetics is a fast-moving and often changing field of study. While the order of geologic time periods will never change, the 20 year-old displays at AMNH are already out of date in several details. For example, there is a cul-de-sac devoted to edentates, which is now considered polyphyletic, and a cladogram in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs incorrectly places tyrannosaurids among the carnosaurs.

Glass architecture lets visitors see through displays and get a sense of what lies beyond. Photo by the author.

Neat comparison of mammal teeth. Too bad there's no obvious label.

This display is a great example of the diversity in mammal teeth, but it’s a confusing centerpiece for the Hall of Primitive Mammals. Photo by the author.

The AMNH fossil exhibits excel in many respects, chiefly in the amazing diversity and quantity of specimens on display. The exhibit throws a lot of good science at visitors, but falters in explaining why it matters. The point of all this is not to nit-pick the design choices at AMNH, but to reiterate that phylogenetically-arranged fossil exhibits are really hard to pull off. This is not the most intuitive way to introduce the history of life, or even the process of evolution. With so much background to cover, perhaps a more structured and linear layout would be better. In fact, a lot of my issues with the AMNH fossil exhibits seem to stem from a disconnect between the phylogenetic interpretive content and the wide-open aesthetics. Open exhibits can be great, but in this case it hinders the learning opportunities for self-guided groups of visitors. It’s difficult to imagine a typical visitor, arriving with their family or another mixed-age group, having the patience to make sense of it all. Regrettably, such visitors default to the dinosaur pageantry level of understanding, making all the work invested in creating a meaningful exhibit space for naught.

References

Norell, M, Gaffney, E, and Dingus, L. (1995). Discovering Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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, dinosaurs, exhibits, fish, FMNH, fossil mounts, mammals, museums, opinion, reptiles, reviews, systematics

Tagged as amnh, dinosaurs, evolution, exhibit reviews, exhibits, fossil mounts, fossils, mammals, museums, natural history museums, paleontology, science communication

January 14, 2015 · 11:04 am

Framing Fossil Exhibits: A Walk Through Time

Half a year ago, I promised a series of posts comparing the common strategies for framing the history of life in museum exhibits. This post is the first step toward making good on that goal. Historically, fossil displays at major natural history museums amounted to little more than dinosaur pageant shows, and even today this is all many visitors want or expect. The challenge for exhibit creators is to contextualize the fossils as part of a greater narrative without being alienating, overwhelming, or perhaps worst of all, condescending. A large, permanent exhibit is an enormously time-consuming and expensive undertaking. The opportunity to build or thoroughly renovate an exhibition might occur only once in a generation, so there is exceptional pressure to produce something that succeeds and endures. Exhibits tend to be products of their time, however, and are strongly influenced both by contemporary scholarship and trends in museum theory.

One of the most enduring formats for exploring the fossil record is the “walk through time.” A chronological portrayal of the history of life is an obvious solution, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. Audiences are predisposed to understand the forward progression of time, so little up-front explanation is needed. It also helps that the geological timescale compartmentalizes the history of Earth into tidy units. Each Era, Period, or Epoch has a unique cast of characters and a few defining events that make it easy to sum up. There are plenty of examples of chronological fossil exhibits, including Prehistoric Journey at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, The Third Planet at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and even traveling exhibits like Ultimate Dinosaurs. For this post, though, I’ll be using the Field Museum of Natural History’s “Evolving Planet” as my primary case study, since it so thoroughly embraces the “walk through time” format (and I have a good set of photos on hand to jog my memory).

Map of the Field Museum’s Evolving Planet galleries. Source

Evolving Planet is a 27,000 sq. ft. journey through the evolution of life. It opened in 2006, although it is notable that Evolving Planet relies heavily on the structure of the previous paleontology exhibit, “Life Over Time.” Major set pieces like the replicated Carboniferous coal swamp and the Apatosaurus mount remained in place while exhibit designers overhauled the aesthetics and narrative. The most important change is the explicit focus on evolution. Although evolution is key to all biological sciences and the evidence for it is overwhelming, many schools in the United States fail to teach evolution properly and at least a third of the population rejects it outright. As destinations for life-long learning, museums are well-poised to address this deficit in evolutionary understanding, and the Field Museum has enthusiastically risen to the occasion. Evolving Earth weaves the evidence for evolution into all aspects of the displays. The first thing visitors see is the thesis of the exhibit—everything that has ever lived is connected through and is the result of evolution—printed on an otherwise blank wall. Moving forward, visitors learn how evolution via natural selection works, and how we know. Along the way, common misconceptions, such as the idea that lineages improve over time, or that evolution is “just a theory” are proactively addressed and corrected.

The thesis of Evolving Planet cannot be missed. Photo by the author.

This pedagogical approach defines a trend in exhibit design that began in earnest in the 1950s. Early natural history exhibits were designed by and for experts, combining expansive collections of carefully arranged specimens with a few “iconic” displays, such as dinosaur skeletons or taxidermy mounts. By the mid-20th century, however, visitor-centric ideas had begun to take root. Designers began to envision the routes visitors would travel through an exhibit space, and consider what they would look at first when entering a room, and why. Soon hierarchical signage (main ideas in big text, working down to sub-topics and specimen labels) became the norm. Exhibits were enriched with interpretive displays, like dioramas, and scholarly labels were replaced by conversational text and even multimedia. By the 1970s, most of the exhibit responsibilities once held by curators were now handled by exhibit designers and developers. No longer places to explore a collection and view objects at will, exhibits now had carefully structured narratives built around explicit educational goals. In the 80s and 90s, the very floorplans of new exhibits came to reflect this identity, as open halls were replaced with carefully directed switch-backing corridors.

Each geological time period in Evolving Planet is color-coded. Photo by the author.

Once we reach the Permian, the fossils can start to speak for themselves. Photo by the author.

Evolving Planet is, for better or worse, thoroughly rooted in the late 20th century tradition of exhibit design. As the map above shows, once visitors enter Evolving Planet, they are committed to a lengthy trek along a predetermined route. There are no shortcuts to the dinosaurs – you must traverse the entire history of life, starting with its origins in the Precambrian. Along the way, you’ll become familiar with the exhibit’s iconography. Every time you enter a new geologic period, you are greeted by a “Timeline Moment.” These include a chapter heading, a back-lit illustration, an update of where you are on the timeline, and a summation of the key evolutionary innovations and environmental changes of that age. All the walls and graphics in each section are also color-coded, making your progression to each new period very distinct. Finally, the path is occasionally interrupted by unmissable black and red area indicating that a mass extinction has occurred. The resulting experience feels like walking through a book. Information is relayed in a specific order, and visitors are expected to recall concepts that were introduced in previous sections.

A panoramic CGI recreation of the Burgess Shale fauna brings small, easily overlooked fossils to life. Photo by the author.

One challenge inherent to a chronological narrative of the history of life is that the physical evidence for early organisms simply isn’t very interesting to look at (for non-specialists, anyway). Large mounted skeletons of fossil vertebrates have a lot of presence, but they same can’t be said for stromatolites and wiggly-worm impressions. The designers of Evolving Planet address this problem in two ways. First, they built iconic contextual displays to stand in for fossils that aren’t suitably monumental on their own. The Cambrian section features a panoramic animated recreation of the Burgess Shale environment. Actual fossils are available, but the video is what makes visitors stop and take note. Likewise, the Carboniferous section is dominated by a walk-through diorama of a coal swamp, complete with life-sized giant millipedes and dragonflies. Like the predetermined pathway, these landmark displays are very much in keeping with late 20th century trends in exhibit design. It’s a conceptually odd but admittedly effective reversal of the classic museum: fabricated displays are supported by genuine specimens, instead of the other way around.

Mass extinction markers tell visitors to expect something different up ahead. Photo by the author.

The second strategy concerns the layout of Evolving Planet, which was inherited from the previous exhibit, Life Over Time. The space is shaped like a U, with switch-backing corridors flanking a more open dinosaur section in the middle. Curator Eric Gyllenhaal explained that “the heavy content, on the stuff that people were not familiar with, was the stuff that came first and came afterward, and that’s where we really got into the details of the evolutionary process” (quoted in Asma, pp. 226-227). Visitors are more focused and more inclined to read signs carefully early in the exhibit, so the developers used the introductory rooms to cover challenging concepts like the origins of life and the mechanisms of speciation. This is the “homework” part of the exhibit, and the narrow corridors and limited sightlines keep visitors engaged with the content, without being tempted to run ahead. Once visitors reach the Mesozoic and the dinosaurs, however, the space opens up. Among the dinosaur mounts, visitors are can choose what they wish to view, and in what order. This serves as a reward for putting up with the challenging material up front. The path tightens up again on the way out, but it’s not as pedagogically rigorous as the beginning of the exhibit. Some sections, like the human evolution displays, are actually cul-du-sacs that can be bypassed by visitors anxious to leave.

Although the dinosaurs get a third of the exhibit to themselves, the hall still struggles to contain them. Photo by the author.

The story of human evolution is relegated to a cul-de-sac late in the exhibit. Photo by the author.

Evolving Planet’s chronological narrative and linear structure complement each other nicely. The sequential path gives the exhibit designers significant control over the visitor’s learning experience, and when dealing with widely misunderstood concepts like evolution, the benefits are clear. The exhibit establishes clear learning goals, and designers can be reasonably confident that these goals are being met. Based on the other new permanent exhibitions at the Field Museum, I get the impression that the design team strongly favors linear exhibits. 2008’s “Ancient Americas”, for instance, closely mirrors Evolving Planet’s structure: a set path through a series of themed spaces, unified by consistent iconography. The designers are to be commended for absolutely owning this concept, and realizing it to its full potential.

Exhibit designers deliberately made the path to the exit much more obvious in the second half of Evolving Planet. Photo by the author.

Exhibit designers deliberately made the path to the exit much more obvious in the final stretch of Evolving Planet. Photo by the author.

The problem with a linear design, of course, is that it’s constraining. All visitors enter with prior knowledge and a certain worldview or perspective, and are inclined to be more interested in some displays than others. Linear exhibits largely suppress this by forcing everyone through the same tube. Ironically, the strong emphasis on the sequence of geological time periods may also overstate their importance. While these divisions are defined based on real events like extinctions and faunal turnover, they are still human constructs with often messy borders. Relying too heavily on them understates the importance of long-term, short-term, and localized evolutionary events.

Museums should be educational, and exhibits should challenge visitors, particularly regarding the mechanisms of evolution and the scope and complexity of deep time. Still, there’s something to be said for free choice in elective education. Evolving Planet, and “walk through time” exhibits in general, skews more toward the former. It’s an effective option, but also a safe one. Next time, we’ll take a look at exhibits that frame paleontological science in less intuitive ways.

References

Asma, S.T. 2001. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Diamond, J. and Evans, E.M. 2007. “Museums Teach Evolution.” Society for the Study of Evolution 61:6:1500-1506.

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

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Filed under education, exhibits, FMNH, fossil mounts, museums, reviews, science communication

Tagged as field museum, fossil mounts, history of science, museums, natural history museums, science communication, science education

October 30, 2014 · 10:39 am

Bully for Camarasaurus

Note: This post was written in 2014. It predates Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues’ landmark paper which, among other things, resurrected the genus Brontosaurus. I’ve attempted to update the taxonomy where appropriate, but it may still be a bit of a mess.

The story of the mismatched head of Brontosaurus is one of the best known tales from the history of paleontology. I think I first heard it while watching my tattered VHS copy of More Dinosaurs—scientists had mistakenly mounted the skull of Camarasaurus on an Apatosaurus skeleton, and the error went unnoticed for decades. The legend has been repeated countless times, perhaps because we revel in the idea that even experts can make silly mistakes. Nevertheless, I think it’s time we set the record straight: nobody ever mistakenly placed a Camarasaurus skull on Apatosaurus. The truth is a lot more nuanced—and a lot more interesting—than a simple case of mistaken identity.

Intrinsically related to the head-swap story is the replacement of “Brontosaurus” with “Apatosaurus” in the popular lexicon. This is well covered elsewhere, so I’ll be brief. Scientific names for animals are governed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which includes the principle of priority: if an organism has been given more than one name, the oldest published name is the correct one. Leading 19th century paleontologist O.C. Marsh named Apatosaurus ajax in 1877, based on a vertebral column discovered in the Morrison Formation of Colorado. Two years later, Marsh introduced Brontosaurus excelsus to the world, from a more complete specimen uncovered in rocks of the same age in Wyoming. Like many of Marsh’s publications, these descriptions were extremely brief, offering a scant two paragraphs for each taxon. However, Marsh did provide a longer description of Brontosaurus in 1883, complete with the first-ever restoration of the complete skeleton.

Come play with us, Brontosaurus…forever and ever and ever. Photo courtesy of the AMNH Research Library.

In 1903, Elmer Riggs of the Field Museum of Natural History underwent a survey of sauropod fossils held at various museums and concluded that Brontosaurus excelsus was too similar to Apatosaurus to merit its own genus. The name “Brontosaurus” was dropped, and the species became Apatosaurus excelsus for most of the 20th century. However, a substantial re-evaluation of diplodocoid sauropods by Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues in 2015 reversed Riggs’ decision. So the name Brontosaurus is back, but keep in mind that the species excelsus never actually went anywhere—it was just hidden under the Apatosaurus umbrella. Following Tschopp et al., Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were distinct animals that lived in the same environment.

So how does the mismatched head fit into all of this? The short answer is that it doesn’t. The fact that some Apatosaurus mounts had incorrect heads for much of the 20th century has nothing to do with which name was being used at any given time, although the two issues have often been conflated in popular books. I suspect the two stories got mixed up because paleontologists were pushing to correct both misconceptions around the same time during the dinosaur renaissance.

Marsh’s second and definitive Brontosaurus reconstruction, first published in 1891.

Let’s go back to Marsh’s 1891 Brontosaurus reconstruction*, pictured above. The Brontosaurus type specimen did not include a head, and many have reported that Marsh used a Camarasaurus skull in this illustration. However, this would not have been possible, because the first complete Camarasaurus skull wasn’t discovered until 1899. What Marsh had instead was a few fragmentary bits of Camarasaurus cranial material, plus a snout and jaw (USNM 5730) now thought to be Brachiosaurus (more on this at SV-POW). Although these pieces were found far from the Brontosaurus quarry, Marsh extrapolated from them to create the best-guess skull that appears in his published reconstruction.

*Note that this is the second of two Brontosaurus reconstructions commissioned by Marsh. The first drawing, published in 1883, has somewhat different skull, but it still does not resemble Camarasaurus.

Although Stephen Gould states in his classic essay “Bully for Brontosaurus” that Marsh mounted the Brontosaurus holotype at the Yale Peabody Museum, Marsh never saw his most famous dinosaur assembled in three dimensions. In fact, Marsh strongly disliked the idea of mounting fossil skeletons, considering it a trivial endeavor of no benefit to science. Instead, it was Adam Hermann of the American Museum of Natural History, supervised by Henry Osborn, who built the original Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus mount (AMNH 460), six years after Marsh’s death in 1899.

Clockwise from top: AMNH sculpted skull (Source), Peabody Museum sculpted skull, real Apatosaurus skull (Source), and real Camarasaurus skull.

To create the mounted skeleton, Hermann combined fossil material from four separate individuals. All of the material had been collected by AMNH teams in Wyoming specifically for a display mount—and to beat Andrew Carnegie at building the first mounted sauropod. Like Marsh, however, they failed to find an associated skull (a Camarasaurus-like tooth was allegedly found near the primary specimen, but it has since been lost). Even today, sauropod skulls are notoriously rare, perhaps because they are quick to fall off and roll away during decomposition. Instead, Hermann was forced to make a stand-in skull in plaster. Osborn explained in an associated publication that this model skull was “largely conjectural and based on that of Morosaurus” (Morosaurus was a competing name for Camarasaurus that is no longer used).

Was it really, though? The sculpted skull is charmingly crude, so the overt differences between the model and a real Camarasaurus skull (top and bottom left in the image above) might be attributed to the simplicity of the model. Note that there isn’t even an open space between the upper and lower jaws! Still, Hermann’s model bears a striking resemblance to Marsh’s illustration in certain details, principally the elongate snout and the very large, ovoid orbit. It’s reasonable to assume that Hermann used Marsh’s speculative drawing as a reference, in addition to any actual Camarasaurus material that was available to him. At the very least, it is incorrect to say that AMNH staff mistakenly gave the mount a Camarasaurus skull, since Osborn openly states that it is a “conjectural” model.

A young Mark Norell leads the removal of the sculpted skull from the classic AMNH Apatosaurus. Source

In 1909, a team led by Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History finally discovered a real Apatosaurus skull (third image, lower right). They were working at the eastern Utah quarry that is now Dinosaur National Monument, excavating the most complete Apatosaurus skeleton yet found (CM 3018). The skull in question (cataloged as CM 11162) was not connected to the skeleton, but Douglass had little doubt that they belonged together. Back at the Carnegie Museum, director William Holland all but confirmed this when he found that the skull fit neatly with the skeleton’s first cervical vertebra. As he wrote at the time, “this confirms…that Marsh’s Brontosaurus skull is a myth.”

The Carnegie team prepared and mounted the new Apatosaurus, and Holland initially planned to use the associated skull. However, when Osborn heard about this he threatened to ruin Holland’s career if he went through with it. You see, the new skull looked nothing like the round, pseudo-Camarasaurus model skull on the AMNH mount. Instead, it was flat and broad, like a more robust version of Diplodocus. Osborn wasn’t about to let Holland contradict his museum’s star attraction, and Holland backed down, never completing his planned publication on the true nature of Apatosaurus. Meanwhile, the mounted skeleton at the Carnegie Museum remained headless until Holland’s death in 1932. After that, museum staff quietly added a Camarasaurus-like skull. This was an important event, as it would be the first time an actual cast skull of Camarasaurus (as opposed to a freehand sculpture) would be attached to a mounted Apatosaurus skeleton. While I’ve had no luck determining precisely who was involved, Keith Parsons speculated that the decision was made primarily for aesthetic reasons.

Carnegie Museum Brontosaurus circa 1934. Source

Carnegie Museum Apatosaurus alongside the famed Diplodocus, sometime after 1934. Source

Elmer Riggs assembled a third Apatosaurus mount (FMNH P 25112) at the Field Museum in 1908. Riggs had recovered the articulated and nearly complete back end of the sauropod near Fruita, Colorado in 1901, but was unable to secure funding for further collecting trips to complete the mount. Riggs was forced to mount his half Apatosaurus as-is, and the absurd display stood teetering on its back legs for 50 years. Finally, Riggs’ successor Orville Gilpin acquired enough Apatosaurus fossils to complete the mount in 1958. As usual, no head was available, so Gilpin followed the Carnegie Museum’s lead and gave the mount a cast Camarasaurus skull.

The completed mount as it stood in the 1970s, Camarasaurus head and all.

Orville Gilpin finally completed the FMNH Apatosaurus in 1958.

The last classic apatosaurine mount was built at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1931, using Marsh’s original Brontosaurus excelsus holotype (YPM 1980) and a lot of plaster padding. The skull this mount originally sported (third image, upper right) is undoubtedly the strangest of the lot. A plaster replica sculpted around a small portion of a real Camarasaurus mandible, this model doesn’t look like any known sauropod. The overall shape is much more elongated than either Camarasaurus or the AMNH model, and may have been inspired by Marsh’s hypothetical illustration. Other details, however, are completely new. The anteorbital fenestrae are thin horizontal slashes, rather than the wide openings in previous reconstructions, while the tiny, forward-leaning nares don’t look like any dinosaur skull—real or imaginary—I’ve ever seen. The sculptor is sadly unknown, but this model almost looks like a committee-assembled combination of the Marsh drawing, the AMNH model, and CM 11162 (a.k.a. the real Apatosaurus skull).

During the mid-20th century, vertebrate paleontology lapsed into a quiet period. Although the aging dinosaur displays at American museums remained popular with the public, these animals came to be perceived as evolutionary dead-ends, of little interest to the majority of scientists. The controversies surrounding old mounts were largely forgotten, even among specialists, and museum visitors saw no reason not to accept these reconstructions (museums are, after all, one of the most trusted sources of information around).

The Peabody Brontosaurus with its original head. Note that the Camarasaurus in the foreground also has a sculpted skull.

This changed with the onset of the dinosaur renaissance in the 1970s and 80s, which brought renewed energy to the discipline in the wake of new evidence that dinosaurs had been energetic and socially sophisticated animals. In the midst of this revolution, John McIntosh of Wesleyan University re-identified the real skull of Apatosaurus. Along with David Berman, McIntosh studied the archived notes of Marsh, Douglass, and Holland and tracked down the various specimens on which reconstructed skulls had been based. They determined that Marsh’s restoration of the Brontosaurus skull, long accepted as dogma, had in fact been almost entirely arbitrary. Following the trail of guesswork, misunderstandings, and scientific inertia, McIntosh and Berman proved that Holland had been right all along. The skull recovered at Dinosaur National Monument along with the Carnegie Apatosaurus was in fact the only legitimate skull ever found from an apatosaurine up to that point. In 1981, McIntosh himself replaced the head of the Peabody Museum Brontosaurus with a cast of the Carnegie skull. AMNH, the Field Museum, and the Carnegie Museum followed suit before the decade was out.

Remounted Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum. Photo by the author.

Given the small size of the historic community of dinosaur specialists, it may have been particularly vulnerable to the influences of a few charismatic individuals. To wit, Marsh’s speculative Brontosaurus skull was widely accepted despite a lack of compelling evidence, and Osborn was apparently able to bully Holland out of publishing a find that contradicted the mount at AMNH. What’s more, the legend of the mismatched Brontosaurus skull somehow became distorted by the idea that either Marsh or Osborn had accidentally given their reconstructions the head of Camarasaurus. This is marginally true at best, since both men actually oversaw the creation of composite reconstructions which only passingly resembled Camarasaurus. Nevertheless, the idea that the skull of Camarasaurus was a passable substitute for that of Apatosaurus was apparently well-established by the 1930s, when Carnegie staff hybridized the two sauropods for the first time. Even today, there are numerous conflicting versions of this story, and it is difficult to sort out which details are historically accurate and which are merely assumed.

I’d like to close by pointing out that while the head-swap story is often recounted as a scientific gaffe, it is really an example of science working as it should. Although it took a few decades, the mistakes of the past were overcome by sound evidence. Despite powerful social and political influences, evidence and reason eventually won out, demonstrating the self-corrective power of the scientific process.

References

Berman, D.S. and McIntosh, J.S. 1975. Description of the Palate and Lower Jaw of the Sauropod Dinosaur Diplodocus with Remarks on the Nature of the Skull of Apatosaurus. Journal of Paleontology 49:1:187-199.

Brinkman, P. 2006. Bully for Apatosaurus. Endeavour 30:4:126-130.

Gould, S.J. 1991. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company.

Osborn, H.F. 1905. Skull and Skeleton of the Sauropodous Dinosaurs, Morosaurus and Brontosaurus. Science 22:560:374-376.

Parsons, K.M. 1997. The Wrongheaded Dinosaur. Carnegie Magazine. November/December:38.

Tschopp, E., Mateus, O., and Benson, R.B.J. 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ 3:e857. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.857

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Filed under AMNH, CMNH, dinosaurs, field work, FMNH, fossil mounts, history of science, museums, reptiles, sauropods, systematics

Tagged as apatosaurus, brontosaurus, dinosaurs, Henry Osborn, museums, O.C. Marsh, paleontology, sauropod

April 13, 2014 · 6:48 pm

Displaying the Tyrant King – Part 3

Subtlety is unnessesary when T. rex is involved.

Who needs subtlety when you have a T. rex?

Start with Displaying the Tyrant King Part 1 and Part 2.

Tyrannosaurus rex displays changed for good in the 1990s thanks to two individuals, one real and one fictional. The latter was of course the T. rex from the film Jurassic Park, brought to life with a full-sized hydraulic puppet, game-changing computer animation, and the inspired use of a baby elephant’s screeching cry for the dinosaur’s roar. The film made T. rex real – a breathing, snorting, drooling animal unlike anything audiences had ever seen. Jurassic Park was a tough act to follow, and in one way or another, every subsequent museum display of the tyrant king has had to contend with the shadow cast by the film’s iconic star.

The other dinosaur of the decade was Sue, who scarcely requires introduction. First and foremost, Sue is the most complete Tyrannosaurus ever found, with 80% of the skeleton intact. Approximately 28 years old at the time of her death, Sue is also the eldest T. rex known, as well as one of the largest. The specimen’s completeness and exquisite preservation has allowed paleontologists to ascertain an unprecedented amount of information about the lifestyle of meat-eating dinosaurs. In particular, Sue’s skeleton is riddled with fractured and arthritic bones, as well as evidence of gout and parasitic infection that together paint a dramatic picture of the rough-and-tumble world of the late Cretaceous.

From South Dakota to Chicago

Cast of Sue at Walt Disney World, Orlando. Source

It was the events of Sue’s second life, however, that made her the fossil the world knows by name. Sue was discovered in the late summer of 1990 by avocational fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson (for whom the specimen is named) on the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota. Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute, a commercial outfit that specializes in excavating, preparing, and exhibiting fossils, initially intended to display the Tyrannosaurus at a new facility in Hill City, but soon became embroiled in an ugly four-way legal battle with landowner Maurice Williams, the Cheyenne council, and the United States Department of the Interior. With little precedent for ownership disputes over fossils, it took until 1995 for the District Court to award Williams the skeleton. Williams soon announced that he would put Sue on the auction block, and paleontologists initially worried that the priceless specimen would disappear into the hands of a wealthy collector, or end up in a crass display at a Las Vegas casino. Those fears were put to rest in 1997 when Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History won Sue with financial backing from McDonald’s and Disney. Including the auctioneer’s commission, the price was an astounding $8.36 million.

FMNH and its corporate partners did not pay seven figures for Sue solely to learn about dinosaur pathology. Sue’s remarkable completeness would be a boon to scientists, but her star power was at least as important for the Museum. Sue was a blockbuster attraction that would bring visitors in the door, and her name and likeness could be marketed for additional earned income. As FMNH President John McCarter explained, “we do dinosaurs…so that we can do fish” (quoted in Fiffer 2000). Particularly in the late 1990s, with Jurassic Park still fresh in people’s minds, a Tyrannosaurus would attract visitors and generate funds, which could in turn fund less sensational but equally important research, like ichthyology and entomology.

Still, some worried that McCarter, whose background was in business, not science, was exploiting an important specimen as a marketing gimmick at the expense of the Museum’s educational mission. This echoed similar concerns voiced 80 years earlier, when the original mounted Tyrannosaurus was introduced at the American Museum of Natural History. As president of AMNH, Henry Osborn oversaw the creation of grandiose and dramatic exhibits, with the intent to draw crowds and justify private and municipal financial support. When the Museum unveiled the Tyrannosaurus mount, Osborn held a lavish publicity gala for the New York elite and members of the press. The buzz generated by Osborn’s promotion resulted in lines around the block and front page headlines, but the attention was focused on the spectacle of the dinosaur rather than the science behind it. Many academics derided this as lowest common denominator pandering, while others, like anthropologist Franz Boas, grudgingly accepted that “it is a fond delusion of many museum officers that the attitude of the public is a more serious one, but the majority do not want anything beyond entertainment.”

Original skull of Sue the T. rex, displayed on the upper mezzanine. Photo by the author.

FMNH was under similar scrutiny as museum staff revealed their plans for Sue. The role of the corporate sponsors that paid for the fossils was a particular cause for concern, and the marketing team knew it. Although the idea of T. rex-themed Happy Meals was briefly on the table, McDonald’s and Disney wisely opted to present themselves only as patrons of science. McDonald’s got its name on the new fossil preparation lab at FMNH and Disney got a mounted cast of Sue to display at Walt Disney World, but the principal benefit to the two companies was high-profile exposure in association with youth science education. The Museum retained control over the message, highlighting Sue’s importance to paleontology and only coyly admitting her role as a promotional tool. Likewise, FMNH is the sole profiteer from the litany of shirts, hats, toys, mugs, and assorted trinkets bearing the Sue name and logo that are continually sold at the Museum and around Chicago.

You May Approach Her Majesty

Once Sue arrived at FMNH, the Museum did not hold back marketing the dinosaur as a must-see attraction. A pair of Sue’s teeth went on display days after the auction, which expanded organically into the “Sue Uncrated” exhibit, where visitors could watch the plaster-wrapped bones being unpacked and inventoried. Meanwhile, McDonald’s prepared an educational packet on Sue that was distributed to 60,000 elementary schools.

The main event, of course, was the mounted skeleton, which needed to be ready by the summer of 2000. This was an alarmingly short timetable, and the FMNH team had to hit the ground running. Much of Sue’s skeleton was still buried in rock and plaster. The bones needed to be prepared and stabilized before they could be studied, and they needed to be studied before they could be mounted. In addition, two complete Sue casts had to be fabricated: one for Disney World and one for a McDonald’s-sponsored traveling exhibit. The casts were produced by Research Casting International, the Toronto-based company that recently built the mounted menagerie for “Ultimate Dinosaurs“. Phil Fraley Productions, the same exhibit company that rebuilt the American Museum and Carnegie Museum T. rex mounts, was tapped to mount Sue’s original skeleton.

The mounted skeleton of Sue in the Stanley Field Hall. Photo by the author.

Unlike every other Tyrannosaurus mount before or since, Sue can hardly be called a composite. With the exception of a missing arm, left foot, a couple ribs, and small number of other odds and ends, the mounted Sue skeleton is composed of real fossils from a single individual. FMNH public relations latched onto this fact, emphasizing in press releases that while “many museums are displaying replicas of dinosaur skeletons, the Field Museum has strengthened its commitment to authenticity. This is Sue.” Just as they did with the AMNH Tyrannosaurus, Fraley’s team built an armature with individual brackets securing each bone, allowing them to be removed with relative ease for research and conservation. No bolts were drilled into the bones and no permanent glue was applied, ensuring that the fossils incur only minimal damage for the sake of the exhibit. Despite these improvements over historic mount-making techniques, however, the Sue mount does have some inexplicable anatomical errors. The coracoids should be almost touching in the middle of the chest, but the shoulder girdles are mounted so high on the rib cage that there is a substantial space between them. Consequently, the furcula (wishbone) is also positioned incorrectly.

After a private event not unlike the one held by Osborn in 1915, Sue was revealed to the public on May 17, 2000 with the literal raising of a curtain. A week-long series of celebrations and press junkets introduced Sue to Chicago, and she has been one of the city’s biggest attractions every since. All the publicity paid off, at least in the short term: FMNH attendance soared that year from 1.6 million to 2.4 million. 14 years later, Sue the Tyrannosaurus is still known by name, and is even used as the voice of FMNH on twitter. Interestingly, Sue’s new identity as a Chicago landmark seems to have all but eclipsed the legal dispute that was her original source of fame. A recent RedEye cover story goes so far as to proclaim this South Dakotan skeleton as “pure Chicago.”

The Nation’s T. rex

This customized truck transported the Nation’s T. rex from Montana to Washington, DC.

This year, another Tyrannosaurus specimen has rocketed to Sue-like levels of notoriety. MOR 555, also known as “Wankel Rex”, is being transferred to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where it will eventually be mounted for long-term display. Now dubbed “the Nation’s T. rex“, the promotion of this specimen has mirrored that of Sue in many ways. Front-page media coverage, first-person tweets from the dinosaur and even an official song and dance contest herald the arrival of the fossils from their previous repository, the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. Much like the “Sue Uncrated” exhibit, the process of unpacking the unarticulated bones will soon be on view in a temporary display called “The Rex Room.” Meanwhile, the very name “Nation’s T. rex” is a provocative invented identity akin to Sue’s new status as a Chicagoan.

Nevertheless, the Nation’s T. rex does not quite live up to Sue’s mystique. This Tyrannosaurus is neither as large nor as complete as Sue, and there was no prolonged legal battle or frantic auction in its past. The 60% complete skeleton was found in 1988 by Montana rancher Kathy Wankel, on land owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The fossils are now on a 50 year loan from from the Corps to the Smithsonian, (presumably) a straightforward transfer between federal agencies. In addition, MOR 555 is by no means a new specimen. Several casts of the skeleton are already on display, including exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of the Rockies, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, and even the Google campus. In fact, a cast of the MOR 555 skull has been on display at NMNH for years.

NMNH Director Kirk Johnson, fossil hunter Kathy Wankel, her husband Bob Wankel, and Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick preside over the arrival of the Nation’s T. rex at the Smithsonian. Source

With that in mind, the hype around the Nation’s T. rex might seem like much ado about nothing. As this series has demonstrated, the number of Tyrannosaurus skeletons on exhibit, whether original fossils or casts, has exploded in recent years. A quarter century ago, New York and Pittsburgh were the only places where the world’s most famous dinosaur could be seen in person. Today, there may well be over a hundred Tyrannosaurus mounts worldwide, most of which are identical casts of a handful of specimens. Acquiring and displaying a T. rex is neither risky nor ambitious for a natural history museum. No audience research or focus groups are needed to know that the tyrant king will be a hit. And yet, excessive duplication of a sure thing might eventually lead to monotony and over-saturation.

So far, such fears appear to be unfounded. A specimen like Sue or the Nation’s T. rex is ideal for museums because it is at once scientifically informative and irresistibly captivating. Museums do not need to choose between education and entertainment because a Tyrannosaurus skeleton effectively does both. And even as ever more lifelike dinosaurs grace film screens, museums are still the symbolic home of T. rex. The iconic image associated with Tyrannosaurus is that of a mounted skeleton in a grand museum hall, just as it was when the dinosaur was introduced to the world nearly a century ago. The tyrant king is an ambassador to science that unfailingly excites audiences about the natural world, and museums are lucky to have it.

The Nation’s T. rex in its final pose at the Research Casting International workshop.

This week, NMNH will be celebrating all things Tyrannosaurus, starting with a live webcast of arrival of the Nation’s T. rex on Tuesday morning. Stay tuned to this blog for further coverage of the events!

References

Asma, S.T. 2001. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Boas, F. 1907. Some Principles of Museum Administration. Science 25:650:931-933.

Counts, C.M. 2009. Spectacular Design in Museum Exhibitions. Curator 52: 3: 273-289.

Fiffer, S. 2000. Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. rex ever Found. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.

Larson, N. 2008. “One Hundred Years of Tyrannosaurus rex: The Skeletons.” Tyrannosaurus rex: The Tyrant King. Larson, Peter and Carpenter, Kenneth, eds. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Lee, B.M. 2005. The Business of Dinosaurs: The Chicago Field Museum’s Nonprofit Enterprise. Unpublished thesis, George Washington University.

Rainger, R. 1991. An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1980-1935. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Switek, B. 2013. My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science and our Favorite Dinosaurs. New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Filed under dinosaurs, FMNH, fossil mounts, history of science, movies, museums, NMNH, reptiles, science communication, theropods

Tagged as dinosaurs, fossil mounts, history of science, museums, paleontology, science communication, Tyrannosaurus

Category Archives: FMNH

History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 2

Phase III: Life Over Time

Phase IV: Evolving Planet

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History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 1

Phase I: The Field Columbian Museum

Phase II: Halls 37 and 38

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: Environmental Change

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: Phylogeny

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: A Walk Through Time

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Bully for Camarasaurus

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Displaying the Tyrant King – Part 3

From South Dakota to Chicago

You May Approach Her Majesty

The Nation’s T. rex

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Category Archives: FMNH

History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 2

Phase III: Life Over Time

Phase IV: Evolving Planet

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History of the Field Museum Fossil Halls – Part 1

Phase I: The Field Columbian Museum

Phase II: Halls 37 and 38

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: Environmental Change

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: Phylogeny

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Framing Fossil Exhibits: A Walk Through Time

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Bully for Camarasaurus

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Displaying the Tyrant King – Part 3

From South Dakota to Chicago

You May Approach Her Majesty

The Nation’s T. rex

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