Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life
Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3261850 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lukas Rieppel (0000-0003-3141-7995, Harvard University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 460-490 |
| Publication date | 2012-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/667969 |
| PMID | 23286187 |
| OpenAlex | W2326023789 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 27 |
| References cited | 25 |
This essay examines the exhibition of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dinosaurs provide an especially illuminating lens through which to view the history of museum display practices for two reasons: they made for remarkably spectacular exhibits; and they rested on contested theories about the anatomy, life history, and behavior of long-extinct animals to which curators had no direct observational access. The American Museum sought to capitalize on the popularity of dinosaurs while mitigating the risks of mounting an overtly speculative display by fashioning them into a kind of mixed-media installation made of several elements, including fossilized bone, shellac, iron, and plaster. The resulting sculptures provided visitors with a vivid and lifelike imaginative experience. At the same time, curators, who were anxious to downplay the speculative nature of mounted dinosaurs, drew systematic attention to the material connection that tied individual pieces of fossilized bone to the actual past. Freestanding dinosaurs can therefore be read to have functioned as iconic sculptures that self-consciously advertised their indexical content
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biology · Exhibition · Natural (archaeology · Natural history · Popularity · Prehistory · Sculpture · Visual arts · Ecology · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · History of Science and Natural History · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Psychology
Stora? Utdöda? Djur
Connecting Health and Natural History
Making Our Beasts
Deep Empire
Introduction. At the Vanishing Point
Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention
Making Charismatic Violence
What's your dinosaur? Or, imaginative reconstruction and absolute truth in the museum space
Facts and Fictions
Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs
Museum-audience interaction within permanent exhibitions of natural history museums
A critical review of the application of paleo-art in paleontological exhibition – a case study of the Dinosaurs of China exhibition in Wollaton Hall and Lakeside Arts, Nottingham
Work on the Victorian dinosaur
Progress in life's history
On Drawing Dead Fish
How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric
Reconstructing an incomparable organism
Series of forms, visual techniques, and quantitative devices
Assumptions of authority
The Fossil and the Photograph
Worked to the Bone. A Study of Gilded-Age Transatlantic Scientific Networks in Paleontology
Glass-boxing Science
Trust in Technicians in Paleontology Laboratories
Fine-Grained Analysis
Jesuit Scientists and Mongolian Fossils
Making Sturgeon Count
More-than-human charisma, iconic fossils, and palaeontologists in the United States
| Unique citing works | 27 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,48 |
| Citation span | 1970 - 2025 (56) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 24 |