ABSTRACT Any child that has been to a museum, gone stomping through a creek, or gazed at the stars knows that science learning isn’t confined to a classroom. Children are eager to explore the wonders of the natural world, and parents and teachers value the importance of science education—thus, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (TCMI) has collected science objects and conducted fieldwork since it was first established. During the 1930s, museum staff members drove equipment-laden Model T cars on expeditions known as Prairie Treks. Indianapolis schoolchildren were given the chance to venture to the western United States and investigate the plants and wildlife of the region. Campers learned to identify birds and animals, pan for gold, make plaster casts of dinosaur footprints, and collect fossils and rocks to add to the museum’s collection. The natural science collection at TCMI is composed of more than 10,000 unique objects that help foster both curiosity and enthusiasm for the sciences. Science is an intensely hands-on and investigative endeavor, and this is reflected in the scope and the use of the objects in the collection. Items related to zoology, botany, and geology provide core materials that are utilized throughout the museum in exhibits, programs, and interpretation. TCMI is closing in on its 100-year history. Its unique mission, as the world’s largest children’s museum, helps it to provide public engagement with the geosciences. Today each year more than 1.2 million visitors can experience programs ranging from self-guided discovery to active participation with scientists and their current research. Thousands have joined dinosaur excavations in the rocks of the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota, prepped fossil materials in the Paleo Prep Lab, and even assisted in collection-based research.

ABSTRACT In 2017–2018, two fine arts undergraduate students, Todd Rowan and Moesha Wright, conceived and created a mural for the Dunn-Seiler Museum at Mississippi State University, Mississippi, USA, under the supervision of art professor emeritus Brent Funderburk. Students researched, conceptualized, and painted Mississippi Cretaceous Panorama , which interpreted the Late Cretaceous landscape that once surrounded the university and the momentous extinction event that brought the Mesozoic Era to its close. The project necessitated creativity to address several challenges, including funding, space constraints, and a local population with Young Earth views. The completed mural engages museum visitors with a mosasaur, ceratopsian dinosaur, and a meteorite impact—illustrating the local, terminal Mesozoic geologic history in a nonthreatening venue that can improve community geoliteracy.

ABSTRACT Natural history museums’ (NHMs) primary missions are to collect, curate, and research natural history objects (life, earth, human cultures, and other specimens), and to use them for public education and outreach. The museums have the potential to enhance lifelong science literacy in unique, direct ways based on the collections they house. Ever since 1683, NHMs have exhibited specimens and educated visitors. Now, thousands of NHMs operate across the globe in ~100 countries, but no two of them are alike. Each resembles the others in the primary missions but differs significantly in collection size and diversity, research efforts, staff size and tasks, styles, public displays, outreach, and education. NHMs are thus complicated businesses due to the wide variety of tasks, objectives, and audiences. Collections are the heart of a NHM, for everything depends on them. These collections are all biased for a number of reasons, but none of them could contain an example of every kind of natural history object. The big museums have the oldest and largest collections, while smaller NHMs have mostly local collections. Collections are further biased because only a small part of any of them can be exhibited; hence, specimens with certain attractive characteristics are selected for display and use in education and outreach. Many NHMs use replicas of specimens in occasional displays for a variety of reasons to enhance the visitor experience, chiefly to bring rare or fragile specimens to them. This is all normal and to be expected. The overall outreach aim of NHMs should be to encourage and provide lifelong learning for everyone. People who attend NHMs are mostly educated, and, in Europe and America, chiefly white and middle to upper class. Ethnic or economically disadvantaged groups commonly find NHMs unwelcoming, alienating, and largely irrelevant to their own lives; hence, they make up only a small portion of attendees. In addition, people with physical and mental limitations of mobility, size, sight, hearing, and understanding must be accommodated in NHMs. Museums need to engage these people and to develop programs and exhibits that they will find attractive because these populations will increase in the future. Exciting, stimulating, and engaging exhibits built around the collections of the NHMs can welcome all groups, if the culture and experiences of these people are understood. Sight, touch, sound, and smell are part of a more realistic exhibit and can reinforce the attractiveness of an exhibit. Real objects from the collections, displayed with imagination and creativity focused on the entire population served by the museum, can captivate and welcome people back again and encourage new visitors to attend. Technology should be adopted to complement, not replace, exhibits of actual specimens from the NHM. Perhaps the most important computer technology will be artificial intelligence (AI). This bodes well for the future in planning, organizing, and integrating all aspects of the complicated functioning of a NHM.

ABSTRACT Carl Akeley (1864–1926) started a revolution in museum exhibit design when he created his muskrat diorama for the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1890. It was the first museum exhibit to show an animal in its natural habitat and the first to have a realistic background painted to create the illusion of depth and continuity of the animal’s environment. After the Scientific Revolution began and especially during the “Age of the Marvelous” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collections of natural and human-made objects were displayed in “wünderkammern,” rooms of wonder or curiosity cabinets, often arranged in a way that we might now consider strange, without a modern understanding of systematics, environmental, or cultural context. From the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century until Akeley’s muskrat diorama, taxonomic groupings dominated museum displays. Akeley’s genius as a taxidermist gave the dioramas an unsurpassed realism. Instead of stuffing animal skins with straw and cotton as taxidermists had done for centuries, Akeley mounted the skins over armatures that he steadily improved as he moved from Milwaukee to the Field Museum in Chicago, and finally to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He modeled ancillary items such as plants in the diorama with obsessive detail. The results were unprecedented evocations of living animals actively engaged in their ecological niches (herein defined as their place in nature, including their activities). Akeley’s focus was the same as that of the great minds of the Scientific Revolution, and it’s the same as scientists’ today: the geometry of nature, its structural detail, and spatial relationships. Akeley showed not only the form and structure of animals in his dioramas, but he also defined the environmental space that encompassed them as well. Akeley’s focus was more mundane than Descartes’s res extensa or Stephen Hawking’s dark matter between cosmic bodies, but Akeley for the first time showed the general public that they could see the form and structure of animals and the space between in an altogether new way. Today that vision has a name, ecology. And we call its conception in deep time, paleoecology.