| Of all the work done by the Plant Reproduction Laboratory, its crowning achievement was the diorama of a 300-million-year-old forest of the Carboniferous period of the Paleozoic Era-the "coal forest." When it opened in 1931, the coal forest exhibit was an instant success. Dahlgren and his staff spent three years constructing the diorama, down to salamanders and a dragonfly with a two-foot wing span. |
© The Field Museum, #GEO75400
The Coal Forest Diorama, part of which can be viewed in the Life Over Time exhibit.
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| Dahlgren himself spoke of the "long and tedious task" of making the models, a job that occupied all six of the laboratory's workers. Not only did Dahlgren use specimens from The Field Museum's collections for models, he also took impressions from objects in the collections at McGill University in Montreal and in the National Museum in Washington, D.C.
Today, nearly sixty years after the coal forest was created, The Field Museum still receives requests every year from all over the world for permission to reproduce pictures of it in biology textbooks and in encyclopedias. The coal forest itself, greatly expanded and modified to reflect new knowledge, was moved in 1992 to a prominent position in the Museum's exhibit Life Over Time. |
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