Noah's Arks: Habitat Dioramas and Their Administrators

Habitat dioramas have been key elements of display in natural history museums since the beginning of the twentieth century. Made using taxidermy specimens, vegetation and dramatic background paintings, these installations were created to give museum visitors a glimpse into the wild. Now, years later, many museums are faced with questions about how to use their aging collection of habitat dioramas to connect with the twenty-first century audience. Different institutions have chosen to tackle this matter in different ways. Many museums are interested in telling their visitors about the history of natural history itself and about their institutions' role in the development of scientific thought. For some of these institutions, dioramas are now natural history objects in and of themselves, worthy of study for their historical and aesthetic qualities. Some institutions also insist that the dioramas are still relevant, maintaining that habitat displays can still connect visitors to wildlife in ways that other media cannot. More practical concerns arise around dioramas, including an unwillingness to discard them permanently based, in part, on a fear of what might be lost. As a result, some museums repurpose their dioramas to tell new stories about the research and use them to connect to visitors in a new way. But beyond any scientific or historical reason, museums today cite visitors' emotional attachment to their habitat dioramas as the main reason that their dioramas exist in their institutions today.