The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is rolling out two new exhibition halls and making its scientists more accessible. And don’t forget the dinosaurs.
This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Guiding a visitor along the 22-foot-high, 406-foot-long curtain of glass fronting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit hall, Caitlin Colleary spots a familiar face — one from which three large horns are protruding.
“Triceratops is here!” Colleary, a paleontologist, exclaims.
Yes, Trudy the Triceratops (as she has been nicknamed by Colleary and her colleagues) arrived a few days early in her new home — all six tons of her, perched on a platform amid tarps and wood scattered around the floor of the new hall, still eight months away from completion.
Trudy — a casting from the American Museum of Natural History in New York — was the first of her prehistoric pals to be moved into this new location in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From here, she can stand, with a menacing look, brandishing her distinctive, three-foot-long horns.
Trudy has been placed by the glass wall of the 50,000-square-foot exhibit hall called Dynamic Earth, one of two halls under construction at the museum, and scheduled to open in December. The $150 million renovation features a second, 25,000-square-foot hall called Evolving Life, not to mention a redesign of the museum’s facade.
It’s the most significant makeover of the 104-year-old museum since it moved from downtown Cleveland to its current location in the University Circle neighborhood, near the campus of Case Western Reserve University, in 1955.