Ben Miller

Very dark museum gallery with primarily black, backlit graphics. A big, reddish meteor-shaped logo says Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs. A vertically oriented header in the next room says Diversity.

A life-sized Paraceratherium model leans it's head toward the ground. Nearby people don't come up to it's knees.

View down a narrow museum gallery. Cartoony, silhouetted images of ashy, burnt out landscapes.

Life-sized illuminated illustration of a green Titanoboa squiggling across the wall. A case with assorted fossils in front of it.

I saw Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs at AMNH today! I thought it was pretty good, but it was especially interesting because I just co-wrote a similarly-sized exhibit on the exact same subject (After the Age of Dinosaurs at the Field).

Here’s an early #FossilFriday 🧵 comparing the two.

Yep, I meant bother!

The registrar’s job is to track the movement and safety of collections objects while they’re on exhibit. Since this exhibit is meant to travel that means being present every time the objects are installed or deinstalled.

drawing of a fantasy interpretation of a basilosaurus, a long bodied extinct whale with hind flippers. its body is patterned with multicolored squares like a quilt

extremely realistic basilosaurus reconstruction

Have any of you seen one or both exhibits? What did you think?

Various backlit panels with lots of paragraphs of small white text and occasional stock photos. A vertical red banner says Evidence.

In the foreground, a panel about how humans are adapted to grasslands. In the background, two video screens and an assortment of taxidermy and models of modern animals.

A minimalist pantodont model with carved out spaces for the skull and femur. Cartoony mammal illustrations are projected on the wall to the left, and a Diatryma skeleton is to the right.

Irregular archways retreat into space. The nearer ones are warm colors and the further ones are cool colors. They are labeled with millions of years after impact. Floor graphics list the corresponding global temperature. There's a uintathere skull in a case to the left.

Like many AMNH exhibits, I think their show is too wordy and visually busy, and it gets caught up in a lot of unneeded tangents. IMO our exhibit is more focused and narratively disciplined.

Big, 5-foot square rock slab containing a branch of a mallow tree and a single fish

Rectangular slab containing skeleton of a mousebird

Case with upside-down skull, jaw, and pelvis of a pantodont mammal

Case with huge skull of a brontothere

I was worried our exhibit was light on fossils, but the AMNH show only has three! And they’re not very compelling. Makes me wonder why even both involving a registrar at that point.

Graphic panel with header Could we protect ourselves? It lists ways people could stop a doomsday asteroid, including spacecraft impact, lasers, and nuclear bomb.

The AMNH exhibit has a whole display on how humans can prevent future asteroid impacts, which I'll admit never even occurred to us!

Life-sized models of a mosasaur and plesiosaur, suspended in front of a dark corner. Vertically oriented banner says Marine Giants.

Exhibit panel says What else was here? and has an assortment of labeled illustrations of dinosaurs and other animals. To the right, a touchable Triceratops toe and skin section.

Pink and purple space with yellow pollen dancing on the floor. Displays ahead about pollen and DNA.

Gallery with green cutout trees and cattails, several cases with small slab fossils, and a mural showing a lakeside landscape.

AMNH devotes more space to the pre-extinction world, and to covering what's going on in the oceans. Meanwhile, we took deep dives into pollen counts, molecular clock data, and the Green River ecosystem.

Black and green display. Graphic backdrop features three mammal skull photos. Below, four cast skulls are on flip boards you can raise up to learn more about them.

A pink and purple space with oversized models of mammal teeth with color-coded cusps. Under the header text Hoofed Mammals Take Off is a case with the real, tiny fossils.

Both exhibits highlight similar points of interest: the short-lived fern world, the rise of bean plants and rainforests, and how you can tell mammals' lifestyles apart from their teeth.

Life-sized, detailed diorama starring Triceratops with a log in it's mouth. A backdrop image shows a river with forest on the other side. There are small mammal and bird models all around.

Green and black display has head of Titanoboa model looking over it. The snake's tail is poking out the other side.

Museum gallery with cutout silhouettes of trees and vines among cases with plant fossils. A mural with cartoony primates is further on.

Life-sized sad-looking cartoon mammoth in a blueish corner with a case containing a sample of mammoth fur. Header nearby says Mammals Chill During the Ice Ages.

The most obvious difference is AMNH invested in lots of realistic life-sized replications (all made in-house, kudos for that), while we went for a more whimsical look, using Jay Ryan’s pop art-style illustrations throughout.

Curved projection screen shows a grey, burnt out forest. Families sit on low seats in front.

Three-part projecin screen showing paper cutout-style images of dinosaurs in a tropical forest. There is low seating in front.

Both exhibits cover the same story: the end-Cretaceous extinction and recovery of life on Earth on the scale of days, years, and millions of years. In some places they’re uncannily similar, particularly the use of a timed-entry theater to cover the asteroid impact.

Very dark museum gallery with primarily black, backlit graphics. A big, reddish meteor-shaped logo says Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs. A vertically oriented header in the next room says Diversity.

A life-sized Paraceratherium model leans it's head toward the ground. Nearby people don't come up to it's knees.

View down a narrow museum gallery. Cartoony, silhouetted images of ashy, burnt out landscapes.

Life-sized illuminated illustration of a green Titanoboa squiggling across the wall. A case with assorted fossils in front of it.

I saw Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs at AMNH today! I thought it was pretty good, but it was especially interesting because I just co-wrote a similarly-sized exhibit on the exact same subject (After the Age of Dinosaurs at the Field).

Here’s an early #FossilFriday 🧵 comparing the two.

Stegosaurus mounted skeleton in front of Saturn backdrop. Tail is held high, neck is held low.

Larger Stegosaurus skeleton in front of green and white walls. Tail is also held high, neck low.

You know the muscular/skeletal anatomy better than I do, but Sophie looks to be carrying its weight more comfortably to me. It's the flexed knees on Apex (ouch), and something about the way the neck is held?

View of mounted Stegosaurus skeleton from above. It's got a fairly long body and tail compared to other reconstructions. In a walled pit with bits of other skeletons visible at the edges of the frame.

Denver Stego rules, but might come in second to Ken Carpenter's *other* Stegosaurus mount for me (at the Prehistoric Museum in Price)

Smithsonian Acquires Exceptionally Complete Skull of Iconic Dome-Headed Dinosaur

Pachycephalosaurus sold at auction donated to NMNH, will be on display next week
www.si.edu/newsdesk/rel...

The fossil itself is nice enough, but I had the same in-person impression as I did from photos: the mount looks very stiff and uncomfortable. I don’t know who made the mount, only that it was done for the Sotheby’s auction and wasn’t changed by the museum.

Mounted skeleton of a Stegosaurus. Pose looks very uncomfortable due to bent knees, downward-curved neck and general stiffness

Same from reverse (left) side. Honeycomb like architecture behind

Met Apex the skidding Stegosaurus!

Engraving of an underground cavern with a couple of flying bats in the air. A group of gnomes with digging tools are gathered round looking at a fossil skeleton of an ichthyosaur buried in the rock.

#WyrdWednesday 'Gnomes of the German legends laying bare the skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus'

From 'The Universe, or, The infinitely great and the infinitely little' by Félix-Archimède Pouchet, 1895

wellcomecollection.org/works/j62xw8...

hell yeah

🦕

Large plush Archaeopteryx with black and white patterning and blue face sits on a pile of papers

You all should buy a whole bunch of these plush Archies in official Chicago Archaeopteryx colors because they took forever to get approved and manufactured!

This one’s for my nephew but I might need one too…

🦖 30 years of wonder. Millions of visitors. One unforgettable journey through Earth’s ancient past. Explore the origin story of #PrehistoricJourney in our newest #Catalyst article! https://dmns.mobi/4pUyraL

On a recent visit to the facility, its rooms contained little aside from some empty metal shelves. It was sweltering inside, and a museum official said he had ordered air conditioning units, (highlighted) though the bronzes had survived in Benin City’s climate for hundreds of years before they were looted.(/highlighted) Such basic storage might displease some Western museums, but Holloway said that no one had no right to tell Nigerians what to do with their heritage.

This is the thing though
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/a...

None of the photos are at the right angle to confirm but everything should be open again

I just want to climb up there and push them down!

I don't love the art gallery aesthetic, but that wasn't gonna change during a 4 week closure. I also wish the casts' feet were flush with the floor—the floaty feet spoil the weight and momentum of the casts' poses.

But I'm pleased that these fossils and casts are out on display, all the same!

The theropod row was reorganized in the process, and now is visible from multiple sides. Wendiceratops has joined this group, along with Daspletosaurus and Centrosaurus skulls. The ichthyosaur wall has also been moved.

We can all relax now, ROM put out some press photos over the weekend!

Basically, the space between the Jurassic/hadrosaur hall and the T. rex/Cenozoic hall has been opened up, and now houses the real Zuul fossil plus the cast Gorgosaurus vs Zuul created for a temporary exhibit in 2019.

ST was one of the shows I was thinking of when I wrote this. I’m sure id get more out of season 5 if 4 was fresh in my mind, but it’s so absurdly long I know I’m never going to watch it again.

I can't think of a single tv show I've seen in the last 5-10 years that wouldn't have been better as a two hour movie.

This is a shame because books/movies/shows/games are best the 2nd or 3rd time, but there aren't enough hours in a life to watch any of these 8-12 hour seasons more than once.