PREFACE
THE MIRRORThe shiny loors of the Hall of North Amer-
ican Mammals at the American Museum
of Natural History, normally echoing with
the footfalls of fourteen thousand daily vis-
itors, are quiet. In a glass case, fourteen feet
by eight feet, a model bull elk—actual size,
clad in actual elk skin—bugles to attract
more females, even as three already in his
harem graze on the chokecherry and aspen
around an approximation of Trappers Lake
in northwestern Colorado. The diorama is
normally behind glass, but the glass is broken.
Bec Meah is here to ix it. Meah is a pre-
parator, one of the trained ine artists—she’s
a sculptor—who builds and maintains the
museum’s exhibitions. She’s working with
Stephen Quinn, dean of the museum’s pre-
parators. He’ll retire in a few years after
four decades in the Department of Exhibi-
tion. Quinn tells Meah about all the tricks
the old preparators used on the dioramas
in this hall, the oldest of which date to the
1940s: marble dust for snow. Motor oil as
the dark, slick soil traversed by a wet ani-
mal. Static electricity on pu s of cotton to
raise the fuzzy surface of a lower.
Quinn asks Meah to look inside the bull’s
mouth. She climbs a ladder, and when she
looks down into its maw, frozen mid-bugle,
she sees a small mirror. It picks up the light-
ing in the diorama, and—subtly—it glows.
Meah thinks about the preparators whoworked in the same cavernous workshop on
the museum’s i fth loor that she does, and the
calculations they must have made about the
angle of the glass, and the position and inten-
sity of the lights. They knew that without the
mirror, the inside of the elk’s mouth would be
pitch black, and that wouldn’t look real. The
human visitors would see that it didn’t look
real. And even if they didn’t quite know why
it didn’t look real, something would be slightly
o , and that would defeat the purpose for the
museum-goers who trudged through Central
Park in New York City and into this place t wo
thousand miles from Trappers Lake, to look
through this glass window into a world that
existed before their own.103 DAYS
UNTIL OPENINGEARLY EXPERIMENTS
IN THE CONSTRUCTION
OF BRAINSBrittany Janaszak arrives at the museum
around 10 a.m. She’s on a team that has
just begun work on a major exhibit called
“Unseen Oceans.” The museum stages one
or two new exhibitions each year, each of
which explores the cutting-edge science on a
speciic subject, and the ocean is next. It will
run for a year, then travel for up to a decade,
educating people around the world.
The Exhibition Department has fourteen
weeks to build “Unseen Oceans.”
The American Museum of Natural His-
tory was founded in 1869 and has the feel of
a great library of antiquity. There are twenty-
ive buildings on its eighteen-acre campus on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The museum
holds dinosaur fossils, Native A merican ar t,
mummies, and the slice of a tree with rings
dating back to 550 A.D. It contains a gradu-
ate school, a ive-hundred-thousand-volume
research library, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a
34-million-object collection including, in the
bowels of some storage room pungent with
formaldehyde, in a metal tank the size of an
aboveground pool, a giant squid.
On this morning, Janaszak negotiates a
labyrinth of marble halls and grand staircases
and comes to a freight elevator in the muse-
um’s northwest corner, which she rides to the
ifth loor. Its blue double doors open directly
into the Exhibition workshop. The space used
to be the museum’s coal-fired power plant,
before New York had a power grid.
Objects from the collection are shoved