Due to the strong relationship between the lab and the museum's extensive research and curation wing, the department has been among the first to introduce brand new topics to the public.
They have produced, among others, the first exhibits to discuss Darwinian evolution,[1] human-induced climate change[2] and the Mesozoic mass extinction via asteroid.
Notable among them is the Akeley Hall of African Mammals which opened in 1936, at a time before widespread color photography.
It took more than a decade to create the scenes depicted in the hall which includes a 432 square foot (40 m²) diorama of the American bison.
In 1997 museum artists and scientists traveled to the Central African Republic to collect samples and photographs for the construction of a 3,000 square foot (300 m2) recreation of a tropical West African rainforest, the Dzanga-Sangha rain forest diorama in the Hall of Biodiversity.