ABSTRACT Art about ancient life chronicles the human condition, less evidently but potentially as significantly, as it depicts life through geologic time. Selected examples surveyed here reveal human aspirations, values, conceits, sensibilities, and foibles and suggest that further in-depth study would be warranted. Greek bronzes embellished with griffins (625–575 B.C.E.) may represent ceratopsian fossils mythologized and commodified for their proximity to gold deposits. Encelius’ anthropomorphized drawing (1557) of a fossil bivalve exemplifies a conservative deference to outdated paradigms about nature; inversely, Nicolaus Steno prized geometry—then offering a new perspective on nature—and realized in 1667 that a drawing of “tongue stones” depicted not, as commonly held, simulacra of snake tongues molded by vital forces within the Earth but fossilized teeth of a once living shark; Beringer’s “lying stones” (1726) show how human conceit can bias the interpretation of “fossils.” Artworks since the mid-twentieth century record a growing recognition that ancient life and its habitats evolved together and therefore that art about ancient life has lessons for contemporary environmentalism: Rudolph Zallinger’s diachronous murals (mid-1940s) and the Milwaukee Public Museum’s diachronous dioramas (installed in 2001) display progressions of ancient and contemporary habitats; Alexis Rockman’s dystopian landscapes use ancient and extant life to critique human responsibility for degrading environments and endangering species. We conclude that studies of art about ancient life can deepen our understanding of the human condition and the cultural context in which it is created.

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.

ABSTRACT Milwaukee Public Museum has been presenting scientific concepts to audiences for 134 years. The exhibit methods have moved beyond specimen display and beyond the museum walls. Today, museums bring science to the public and scientific community through searchable collections databases, contextual websites, and social media. The “Silurian Reef” exhibit, with associated collections, website, and online database are examples of the ways science, public audiences, and museums interact and how these interactions have evolved over the past 130 years. The Schoonmaker Reef in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was the first fossil reef recognized in North America and attracted geologists such as James Hall (1811–1898), T.C. Chamberlin (1843–1928), and I.A. Lapham (1811–1875) to recognize its importance. Fossils from this locality and others in SE Wisconsin form the large Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) collection. The MPM Silurian diorama, reconstructing one of these reef ecosystems, was created in 1985 as part of the “Third Planet” exhibit. This was one of the earliest museum exhibits to present plate tectonics and the evolution of life as one story. MPM’s Silurian collections were central to published research on the biodiversity and ecology of Silurian communities (Watkins, 1993). The collections, research, and exhibit were the foundation for an innovative website; The Virtual Silurian Reef (VSR) was developed in 1997. The VSR is an educational outreach website that explores the significance of Silurian reefs and concepts of evolution, plate tectonics, and biodiversity. More recently, MPM, in partnership with the Field Museum, digitized our Silurian collections and created a searchable online database housed on a redesigned VSR. The collections, website, and searchable database have given academic researchers better access to specimens in both MPM and Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) in Chicago collections. A larger impact has been the broad audiences reached. The website and exhibit have been used in National Science Foundation–funded educational outreach, by educators, artists, and fossil-hunting kids. Images and text from the website and database are found on interpretive signs in local and state parks and on trails that overlook historic collecting localities. The fossil specimens have even been used to model bronze fossil play sculptures for a city park.