Why You’ll Love the Reimagined Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Cleveland Museum of Natural History regulars have their favorites. There’s “Happy,” a massive skeleton of a Haplocanthosaurus — discovered by a CMNH team in Colorado in 1954 —  that has long served as the institution’s mascot.

Then there’s Balto, the dog that led the famous 1925 Serum Run, which brought life-saving medicine to Nome, Alaska. When a Cleveland businessman discovered in 1927 that the dog and his teammates ended up in a Los Angeles sideshow, he led a community fundraising effort to purchase the canines so they could live out the rest of their days in Ohio as heroes. (Balto ended up at the museum following his natural death in 1933.)

Both specimens are found in the public Visitor Hall of the newly reimagined Cleveland Museum of Natural History, located on University Circle. “Happy” lords over the large, open lobby space, while the nearby Balto exhibit presents the beautifully taxidermied remains of the dog standing against a snowy northern landscape.

The love Clevelanders have for these items is one of the reasons the museum decided to place them on public view. Visitors can stop in and see these favorites without having to purchase a ticket to the museum. Along with “Happy” and Balto, six other items that have a connection to both science and the city are displayed in the free-flowing space.

“It’s a community trailhead. We want people to come here,” says Sonia Winner, president and CEO of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “We want it to be more than just a traditional natural history museum. … We want to be the region’s family room.”

The museum unveiled its Visitor Hall at the end of 2023 as a glimpse of what was to come when the institution’s $150 million reimagining was complete. That work is now done, and the full museum reopened to the public Dec. 15. The result is an achievement that not only tells the story of Earth’s natural history in a compelling and modern way but also one that provides context for Cleveland’s place in the world.

The first clue comes in the shape of the building, which resembles a glacier, with floor-to-ceiling windows running along its side. Glaciers once covered about two-thirds of what is now Ohio and are the reason the Great Lakes exist today.

“Glaciers carved the Great Lakes. It’s why our environment looks like it does,” says Gavin Svenson, chief science officer at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “And then the landscaping is actually a presentation of a glacial moraine. When glaciers melted and they pulled back, they left this incredible habitat behind. … People don’t think of northeast Ohio as a biodiverse place, but it really is.”

The museum is also equipped with many more smaller touches that help reflect the place it calls home. The Thelma and Ken H. Smith Environmental Courtyard uses Berea sandstone in the waterfall, and an engraving in the bluestone represents the regional waterways that feed into Lake Erie, which sits just north of the museum, beyond the Cleveland Cultural Gardens and Interstate 90.  

But the true power of the museum’s reimagining comes in experiencing its galleries, which artfully present a selection of the institution’s more than 5 million specimens. These thoughtfully designed spaces are intended to merge art and technology in ways that are not only insightful but also beautiful.

The Ames Family Curiosity Center invites visitors to pull real museum specimens housed in transparent cubes from a series of drawers and examine them under video microscopes. It’s the kind of interaction that brings science and biology to life in ways that books and videos simply cannot.

The Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears Dynamic Earth Wing takes visitors across the 4.6-billion-year history of our planet, starting with the Big Bang (and a reminder that we’re all created from stardust — “even you,” a video playfully reminds museum-goers). This trip back in time explains that things like the first forest and the rise of the dinosaurs are recent history when you look at the really long view. Exhibits throughout the gallery showcase the progression of how single-celled organisms evolved into creatures that finally left water for life on land.

One of the most striking features of the Dynamic Earth Wing is the wall of windows that place some of the museum’s exhibits, including some of its dinosaur skeletons, against the backdrop of University Circle. Silhouettes of pterodactyls on the window glass create an illusion of the animals flying in the distance. (There are also dots printed on the newly installed bird-safe glass to keep our modern-day flying friends from crashing into the building.)

The Evolving Life Wing picks up the story from there, featuring a wealth of museum specimens, media-enhanced dioramas and interactive exhibits that work together to reveal how evolutionary processes shaped all life on Earth and continue to do so today.

An exhibit within this wing showcases the bones of Lucy, a specimen CMNH researcher and former curator Donald Johanson discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 that changed our understanding of human origins. (Artist John Gurche’s three-dimensional, life-size reconstruction of Lucy in the Visitor Hall depicts what she looked like).

The Messages in Light Gallery outside the Nathan and Fanye Shafran Planetarium delves into the tools astronomers have used throughout history to better understand the universe and our place in it, while the Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden provides a home to native Ohio creatures that can’t return to the wild.

What is most notable about the transformation is that the museum discarded the traditional chronological timeline when presenting the story of Earth and life on it, as well as what we can do to work toward a future that protects the fragility of the planet.

“It’s really, really hard to connect people with things that happened 10 million years ago or 300 million years ago — it’s an inconceivable amount of time,” Svenson says. “We don’t follow a timeline. We’re not forcing you into a linear-based approach … We’re simply breaking everything down into relevant stories.”

1 Wade Oval Dr., Cleveland 44106, 216/231-4600, cmnh.org 

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