How are the fossil halls arranged?
The redesigning of our Fossil Halls in the 1990s gave us an opportunity to start from scratch with respect to telling the story of vertebrate history. Traditionally, large exhibits of fossils have been arranged as a “walk through time,” keeping pace with the flow of time and the changing suite of animals that lived together at intervals in Earth’s history. As a leading institution of phylogenetic systematics, or figuring out where and how each animal fits into the tree of life, we decided to feature this perspective in our exhibits. As one walks through the Fossil Halls, one traces ancestries along the trunk and branches of the Tree of Life. Closely-related animals are featured together rather than animals close in time or space.
