Dinosaurs in Their Time, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
www.carnegiemnh.org/dinosaurs/index.htm
Summary
UPCLOSE researchers collaborate with Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) exhibit designers, educators, and scientists to support the conceptual redesign of the museum’s exhibitions. We have worked on a variety of projects with the museum, including the Benedum Hall of Geology, the Hillman Hall of Gems and Minerals, the Fisher Scientific Biotechnology Lab, and distance education programs that brought the museum into contact with schools throughout West Virginia. But our longest and most fruitful collaboration with the museum has been around the redesign of their Dinosaur Hall. The original dinosaur hall housed a world famous collection of Mesozoic fossils, but did not provide much explanatory mediation. The new exhibition, Dinosaurs in Their Time, highlights the diversity of Mesozoic life forms, illustrates that dinosaurs co-existed with hundreds of plant and animal species, and provides rich mediation to support explanations about evolution. UPCLOSE graduate student Sasha Palmquist has been embedded throughout the design process, conducting basic research on audience understanding of dinosaurs and evolution, formative evaluation of signage and computer mediation, and will complete a summative evaluation in Summer 2008.
