International opening | University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

The Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan has two showstopping prehistoric skeletons in the entrance hall, but dig a little deeper and you’ll also find it has brand new biology labs.

The museum recently relocated from a 90-year-old building to the university’s biological sciences facility. The director of the museum, Amy Harris, says the new building is a huge improvement because it helps the institution make use of the latest technology. 

“The physical structure and the needs of modern museums have changed significantly, and we now understand a lot better how people learn in different ways,” says Harris.

She believes the museum’s unique selling point is its connection to the university’s research department. That is why one exhibition is curated solely by university students who are being taught how to present their research to a general audience. 

“The museum space winds through the building so guests can look at the research labs,” Harris says. “As a result, there’s a blurring of boundaries between the public spaces and research areas.”

The university’s natural history collections date to 1837 when the Michigan state legislature created the University of Michigan. 

As part of this, a “cabinet of natural history” was bought. The natural history collections grew over the succeeding decades and the university’s first museum building was created in 1881 to house the original collection.

Amy Harris: The aim of the new building is to have a wide range of ways in which our visitors can engage with the material. There are more hands-on experiences, such as touchscreen interactives and videos. It is about a third larger and we have also displayed a lot more art as it stimulates conversation and curiosity. 

In that vein, we’ve altered Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) to Steam, to include the “a” for arts. This provides a way to engage with science with the addition of art.

Visitors are greeted by a skeleton mastodon [mammoth] couple. It’s the only display of a mastodon couple in the world. They are on a large plinth and above them is the five-storey atrium.

The first talk was fantastic. It was held in our science forum, a theatre-like space, and the attendees asked lots of questions. The first scientist to present was happy because he used to come to this museum as a child. 

The faculty’s postdoctoral and graduate students, which number about 50, have been working in small groups with the museum’s collection managers to help decide how best to present objects. They have also helped review the collection for accuracy. We have also run science communication training programmes for several years and that has fed into the new museum – more than 180 people have done it. 

The training has given students an understanding of how people learn and how to communicate with a lay audience, which has been invaluable in preparation for the new venue.

We support our faculty with research grants, so the museum has helped lots of students. We also work in close proximity with them – there are two university labs that are deliberately on view to the public. One is free for visitors to wander around in, the 

other has more set schedules for visits. This is something we could not offer before.

The five-storey atrium is a dramatic space. Also, we have reorganised our fossil hall into a walk through time, which isn’t a new idea per se, but we feel that it is particularly effective here. We have marked the path with pillars of wood, which highlight the mass extinction of life on earth and each pillar is burned to mark the extent of the extinction. It ends with an activity pillar that questions whether we are having an extinction today as an interactive. Visitors have latched onto that – feedback they have given indicates people really like it.

Our planning consultants pressed us to choose one audience to appeal to while we were still in development stage, but we resisted because we serve both the community and the campus, and within that people of all ages. One thing we are trying to expand is our undergraduate audience, but not at the expense of others. To that end, we had a grand opening just for undergraduates, complete with trivia contests. We also have a new exhibition area curated by students about the work that they have developed with our staff. The undergraduates will also be taking science communication training to help them talk about what they do with the public, whereas until now we have worked with more senior scientists.

We are opening in stages: only half the exhibits were revealed in our April opening. In November, we are launching the other half along with several research stations devoted to faculty research. We need to make sure we mention this to the public as often as possible. So we’re very much hoping everyone will come back when the second half opens.