Skulls
Every skull tells a story. This popular exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences explored the science of skulls—from teeth and jaws that allow animals to hunt and consume food, to eye sockets that support advanced vision to escape predators.
Specimen display: Eye socket position often reveals whether an animal is a predator or prey.
Featuring nearly 650 specimens from the museum’s collections, Skulls offers visitors an opportunity to investigate, discover, and wonder at these amazing bones that record the life stories of their owners.
More than just protection for brains, skulls reveal the evolutionary stories of the vertebrates that possess them; the wildly diverse ways in which animals eat, see, hear, breathe, and communicate; and variations within a species.
Interactive exhibits invited visitors to touch, draw, and test their skull detective skills.
A live colony of flesh-eating beetles showed one technique used by the museum to clean and prepare skulls for its collection. Visitors viewed the live beetles and a timelapse video with fascination—and sometimes revulsion.
One long wall of the gallery featured a swooping display of more than 400 sea lion skulls.
The Skull Detective interactive challenged visitors to identify whether a skull’s eye position, teeth, and other features suggested its owner was an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Project Type & Size
Temporary Exhibition
4000 square feet
Location
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA
Project Role
Associate Director of Exhibit Development: project & editorial direction, coaching and supervision of experience and content developers, liaison with C-suite decision-makers, collaborate on marketing and communications planning.
Collaborators
California Academy of Sciences: Exhibit Studio, Creative Studio, Visualization Studio, Experience Engineering, Interactive, Curatorial & Collections staff
Fabrication: Cinnabar
A sketching table with life-sized skull replicas offer visitors opportunities to touch, look closely, and capture their observations in drawings.
Image credits:
Kathryn Whitney © California Academy of Sciences
Skull Detectives & Sketch a Skull: Brian Simison © California Academy of Sciences
Mixed in among hundreds of sea lion skulls, visitors tried to spot a few imposters. Animal sounds provided clues to some of them.