MUSEUM DISPLAYS DON'T HAVE TO BE BORING DUST-CATCHERS.

The curators of Oxford University's natural history museum never got the memo.

I suppose, if you're curators of Charles Darwin's original records, you have to keep the same sort of display cases Sir Charles would have been familiar with.  Or perhaps, you inject a little humour into those glass cases.

I got spoiled as a kid, visiting Milwaukee's public museum, which, even when it shared space with the Central Library, showed off the animals in their natural habitat.

Michael Sears photograph retrieved from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

That diorama now rates a glass case, because the diorama itself is a museum piece.

Announcing plans for one of the galleries in the new Milwaukee Public Museum, officials noted a key current exhibit will make the move to the new building: "Carl Akeley's famous Muskrats diorama, the first 'Milwaukee-style' exhibit which set the standard for natural museum histories around the world."

When the museum moved from shared quarters with the Central Library, an Indian elephant from the itinerant circus that simply stood on a pedestal by a stairwell (upstairs from the mummy cases) became part of one of the dioramas, being guided by a youngster in the Indian village.  The article notes that Milwaukee's curators were early creators of walk-through habitat dioramas.  It's all in the Milwaukee tradition.

Generally, Milwaukee-style exhibits are considered to be the immersive dioramas that allow visitors to get a sense of what life was like in the environment that is being depicted.

Carl Akeley, widely considered to be "the father of modern taxidermy," was key in the development of the style. He worked at the Milwaukee Public Museum from 1886 to 1892. While there, he created the Muskrat Group exhibit, a diorama behind glass that depicts lifelike muskrats in a true-to-life natural setting, doing the things they would be doing in the wild — standing at attention looking for predators, snuggled up asleep in their den and swimming in the water.

And not checking a pocket watch or engaging the Dormouse in conversation.

The exhibit was considered revolutionary because, before the development of habitat dioramas, the more typical way to display taxidermy was having it lined up in a display case, with less care taken to make the animals look alive and little attention paid to how they would behave in their natural habitats.

Akeley developed a taxidermy style that also contributed to the realism of his exhibits by using the animals' skeletons to derive precise measurements and create life-like sculptures.

The concept has several ancestors.

By the late 1800s, habitat dioramas were catching on in natural history museums, but Akeley's muskrat diorama is credited by many as being the first complete habitat diorama. Because he developed it for the Milwaukee Public Museum, the exhibit style is referred to by some as Milwaukee-style, although others simply call the exhibits habitat dioramas.

Subsequent apprentices continued the work in Milwaukee, while the creator went on to other assignments.

Although there is some dispute as to whether Akeley's exhibit really was the first habitat diorama, there's no question that he popularized the style in the United States. Akeley would go on to create habitat dioramas at Chicago's Field Museum and New York's American Museum of Natural History, where the museum's hall of African mammals is named after him.

Milwaukee's museum will be moving to newer, smaller quarters, and a number of the habitat dioramas from the current museum will be installed, perhaps (in the manner of that circus elephant) in modified habitats.