Most dioramas in the museum depict a real place, 

 somewhere in the natural world. Hence the pro- 

 duction required a costly — and often intrepid — ex- 

 pedition to the site, where extensive collections and 

 field references were gathered. In 1923 the museum 

 sent curator Roy Waldo Miner to scout a site for a 

 diorama that would depict the diversity of life 

 around a tropical coral reef. He chose the Andros 

 reef in the Bahamas for its spectacular stands of 

 elkhorn and staghorn coral and its rich abundance 

 of tropical fish. The collecting team brought back 

 forty tons of coral — including a single specimen 

 weighing two tons — and reassembled it in its orig- 

 inal configuration. 



The era predated scuba diving, and so the artists 

 and curators on the collecting expedition could not 

 swim about freely. Instead, they descended to the 

 seafloor in heavy diving helmets, weighted suits, and 

 boots designed to keep them from floating to the 

 surface. Air was pumped to their helmets through 

 long hoses from a boat above. Chris E. Olsen, tor 



Alaska brown bear diorama (left), on display in the AMNH Hall of 

 North American Mammals, beckons museum visitors with its heroic 

 proportions. Robert Rockwell (above) first sculpted a life-size clay 

 replica of the standing bear, then encased it in plaster. The plaster 

 shell, once dried, was the mold for a papier-mache mannequin on 

 which the tanned skin of the bear was pasted and sewn into place. 



instance, the artist who painted the background of 

 the diorama, carried oil paints and a waterproof can- 

 vas stretched over a glass panel on a weighted easel, 

 to capture the dappling and shimmering effects of 

 light as it passed through the deep water [see photo- 

 graph at right on page 50]. 



The Andros coral reef itself was a vibrant ecosys- 

 tem when the diorama that depicts it was complet- 

 ed in 1935. Today, of course, with the many threats 

 to coral reefs around the world, museum curators 

 would never consider removing any of its coral tor 

 an educational display. Outbreaks of coral disease, 

 sedimentation, overfishing, coral bleaching, and al- 

 gal blooms have all contributed to the reefs' decline. 



By the late 1950s, the popularity of the diorama 

 as an exhibit medium was on the wane. Tele- 

 vision and film competed with the diorama as ways 

 to "experience" nature. In the ensuing decades, in- 

 teractive exhibits made possible by advances in com- 

 puter technology pushed the diorama off the draw- 

 ing board at many museums. 



But the species was only dormant, not ex- 

 tinct. In recent years, the diorama has made 

 something of a comeback, as exhibit design- 

 ers have realized its power to give visitors an 

 experience unattainable through any other 

 medium: a compelling illusion of a place in 

 nature, at life size and in real time. 



In 1996 AMNH sent a team of artists and 

 scientists to the Central African Republic to 

 collect the reference material for its largest 

 diorama, a replica of a tropical African rain 

 forest. For the 2003 renovation of the Mil- 

 stein Hall of Ocean Life, some of the mu- 

 seum's earliest dioramas were meticulously re- 

 stored, such as the one showing the Andros 

 coral reef. Other dioramas, such as the har- 

 bor seal, the elephant seal, and the stellar sea 

 lion, were newly fabricated, from archival 

 specimens collected long ago. 



Although many people sometimes feel dis- 

 tanced from the natural world by civilization, 

 museum dioramas remind us all that we still 

 belong to it. They are an illusion created not 

 to deceive, but — like all great art — to tug at 

 our hearts and open our minds as they draw 

 us in. They are the best way yet invented to 

 accurately reflect, with art, the awe and won- 

 der we feel before nature and the creatures 

 with which we share the earth. Will we trea- 

 sure the planet as we do the dioramas, or w ill 

 they one day become museum pieces in the 

 more pejorative sense, a record of a lost 

 world, as it was before we defiled it? □ 



April 2006 NATURAL HISTORY 



53 



