The Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS), previously the Colorado Museum of Natural History, was established in 1900. Although the museum has made many contributions to archaeology and anthropology, it has also played a crucial role in educating Coloradans about science and natural history.
The museum represented the culmination of the shared visions of Edwin Carter, a naturalist based in Breckenridge, and John Francis Campion, a Denver businessman. The two men believed that such a museum would not only promote the rapidly growing city’s importance within the region, but also educate and entertain citizens. When Carter died in 1901, his private natural history collection of birds and mammals formed the basis of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. The museum opened to the public in 1908, providing citizens with the opportunity to experience and learn about the natural world of Colorado and beyond.
Like New York City’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), on which the DMNS was modeled, and many other museums at the turn of the century, the guiding mission of DMNS has always focused on public science education. According to its founding document, the museum aimed to “encourage and aid the study of Natural Science [and] to advance the general knowledge of kindred subjects.” To further this mission the early exhibits at the DMNS concentrated on the natural world of the Rocky Mountain region. One of the most successful education programs supported educators in Denver public schools with their nature studies curriculum. Begun in the early 1910s, the partnership with the school system continues today. Thousands of schoolchildren had their first experiences with the natural world at the museum. For many children and their caretakers in the 1950s and 1960s, viewing and understanding the natural world was only possible by visiting the habitat dioramas, looking at displays of minerals, or watching a nature movie at the museum on a Saturday morning. The careful placement, labeling, and interpretation of specimens offered the museum-going public a new way to learn about the natural world.
The museum’s governing board originally focused on collecting and exhibiting zoological specimens and objects from Colorado. As a relatively new state (Colorado became a state in 1876), little was known about the natural plants and wildlife in the region. A few local naturalists—scientists who study plants and animals—studied the wildlife of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, but these studies were rarely disseminated to the general public. The Denver museum became a space where this new knowledge of Colorado’s wildlife could be shared with and enjoyed by a wide audience.
The museum’s first professional director, Jesse D. Figgins, arrived in 1910 from AMNH. An experienced exhibit designer and field collector, Figgins proved to be a major influence on the intellectual development and organization of the museum. He introduced new collecting methods to ensure that the museum’s collections featured a wider representation of Colorado’s wildlife. Then, employing techniques learned at the AMNH, he set about designing and building new freestanding cases to hold animal groups. The groups often included a particular collection of animals mounted and displayed in front of a hand-painted flat background, which represented the animals’ natural habitat. The museum visitor viewed the animals from the front through a glass screen. These early dioramas became important educational exhibits for museum visitors.
Figgins expanded the museum’s collections to include paleontology (the study of prehistoric animals) and archaeology. The first Colorado dinosaur to arrive at the museum was a partial skeleton of diplodocus in 1915. Dall DeWeese, a local resident, found the dinosaur in the Garden Park Fossil Area in Cañon City. DeWeese was concerned that Colorado’s dinosaurs and other fossils were being lost to eastern museums and universities. After DeWeese’s discovery, Figgins sent fieldworkers to find fossil sites around the state, and by 1920 one of the museum’s most productive sites for late Eocene mammals was discovered on the eastern plains of Colorado. A few years later, in the 1930s, Frederick Kessler—a Cañon City high school teacher—took a group of his students into the Garden Park Fossil area, where they found another dinosaur: stegosaurus. The stegosaurus became Colorado’s state fossil in 1982, and Kessler’s specimen is now on display in the walk-through exhibit Prehistoric Journey, which opened in 1995 and explores Colorado’s ancient environments. Today, paleontologists at the museum work throughout the American West and around the world, bringing back new discoveries and information about the earth’s past to share with museum visitors and the scientific community.
The museum is renowned for the detailed habitat dioramas that represent different landscapes and animals from all over the world. Alfred M. Bailey, the second museum director, is credited with creating the larger diorama halls in the Denver museum. When the dioramas first appeared in the late 1930s and early 1940s, many visitors experienced the wildlife and landscapes of far-off places for the first time. Habitat dioramas, imitations of the natural environment, are large constructions built into the exhibit hall. They have curved backgrounds depicting scenic views that represent actual locations. In the foreground of the diorama, exhibit designers and workers place plants and rocks—accessories—similar to those found at the site, while in the middle ground they place the specimens of mammals and birds that fieldworkers collected from that area. The placement of specimens and accessories creates a three-dimensional effect that, in essence, tricks the eye of the beholder making it appear as if viewers are actually witnessing a natural scene through a glass window.
Collecting zoological specimens and displaying them in the dioramas introduced the science of ecology to museum visitors. Visitors were able to see how different environments supported a variety of plant life and animals and learned about animals that were endangered or had become extinct as a result of human activity. Many visitors experienced the natural worlds of Alaska, the Amazon Basin, Antarctica, Australia, and Botswana through the work of museum fieldworkers, who had visited those places from the 1920s to the early 1970s. In an era before today’s nature movies and television documentaries helped the public learn about the intricacies of ecology, the DMNS’s first habitat dioramas served this function.
The construction of the Botswana Hall dioramas in the 1970s coincided with the emergence of concern over the killing and poaching of Africa’s large mammals. By displaying African wildlife in a variety of environments, museum curators conveyed the connections between wildlife and the environment and helped raise awareness of the ecological pressures facing faraway places and animals. Moreover, for the first time at the museum, the Botswana Hall included exhibits connecting humans to the environment. The Botswana exhibit placed humans within nature instead of separated from it—a fundamental shift in the museum’s pedagogy.
Since it opened in 1908, the DMNS has played an important role in educating Coloradans and others about the natural world, from the deep past through paleontology to the modern era through the display of wildlife specimens in habitat dioramas. The museum’s commitment to science education continues today.