Will Sillin’s Connecticut River Valley Diorama

Will Sillin, Jurassic Morning, 2006, oil on wall-mounted canvas, 10 x 18 ft., Beneski Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author.

Introduction: Belt Memorial Diorama/Jurassic Diorama/Jurassic Morning¹

The Jurassic diorama by Will Sillin at the Beneski Museum of Natural History does not replicate a complete view of weather in an exact moment in time, but it attempts to represent, based on interpretation of data, what a moment like the one it depicts could conceivably have looked like. The diorama is a multimedia artwork, composed of an oil painting on canvas, a sculpted foreground, and sculpted models of dinosaurs and plants (Figure 1). In the background, against a blue sky and scattered white clouds, are a series of rocky hills, spotted with green vegetation. The horizon is visible in the far left, and the sky is darker and hazy close to the horizon. The midground of the mural is occupied by a lake, which extends outward into the background towards the left, and narrows into shoreline to the right. The shore, along which three dinosaurs roam, is populated with fronded vegetation. In the foreground beyond the mural, waves of sediment, stalks of vegetation, some with the fronds removed (possibly eaten off), and a dead stick bring the Jurassic environment into three-dimensional space. A model of a small dinosaur, looking back towards the theropods in the water, has left visible tracks in the sediment (Figure 2).

Fig. 1. Will Sillin, Jurassic Morning, 2006, oil on wall-mounted canvas, 10 x 18 ft., Beneski Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author.

Fig. 2. Fresh tracks in the sediment. Detail from Jurassic Diorama. Photo by the author.

The work is structured as a display for a natural history museum, designed by an artist with the informational framework of scientific knowledge and expertise as a guide. The diorama was intended to coexist with fossils and other geological displays, and depicts a specific section of what is now the Connecticut River Valley which is geographically proximal to where it is on display. In the museal framing of the object, it is a source of information as much as it is an artistic creation. The landscape, plants, and dinosaurs are all made (and presented) with the intention that they cleave as closely as possible to scientifically accepted understandings of how they all looked, behaved, and interacted. The diorama is not necessarily intended to be perceived as an individual artistic work, but as a scientific illustration, in which the artist must exercise some creativity or license as an interpreter, but does so in order to further some concrete understanding or legibility of what is (or was) empirically real. 

The Collaborative Creation of a Paleoart Diorama

The diorama was commissioned in 2006 as a site-specific work for the newly opening Beneski Museum of Natural History. It was commissioned by (and later dedicated to) Edward Belt, who had been a professor of geology at Amherst since 1970, and who had served as the director of the Beneski Museum’s predecessor on campus, the Pratt Museum of Natural History, from 1995 to 2002.² Belt commissioned the artwork for the diorama from Will Sillin, a landscape and paleontological artist. Sillin, who was trained and primarily works as a landscape painter, had previously created several Connecticut River Valley landscapes, both prehistoric and modern, for Belt in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Sillin went on to create murals for Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, the site of another Jurassic trackway collection.³ 

Sillin used digital modeling to design the diorama before executing the mural and sculptural elements in more traditional physical media. The canvas was glued to the curved wall on which it was mounted in order to create a distorted perspective which creates the illusion of an undistorted landscape from a certain vantage point in which the viewer ideally stands.

Sillin is the artist credited with the creation of the diorama, but the process of designing and constructing it was by necessity collaborative. The entire structure of the diorama and its depiction of Jurassic flora and fauna was guided by the scientific input of paleontologists Kirk Johnson (now director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History), Emma Rainforth, and Paul Olsen. Johnson provided groundwork information about the Jurassic-era environment, and Rainforth and Olsen guided the representation of the dinosaurs.⁴ Sillin also attributes the dinosaur model in the foreground of the piece to paleoartist and model maker Gary Staab.⁵

The conceit of this diorama is that its imagery is rooted in paleontology, not the free speculation of Sillin alone. The label text which explains the visual information provided by the diorama to the viewer in the museum states that the work was “created using evidence taken from sedimentary rocks [from 190 million years ago] found in the Amherst area.” This suggests to the viewer that this depiction of the local Jurassic environment and the organisms inhabiting it is based in scientific fact, derived from geological evidence; it is an artistic representation of the facts of the past rather than a purely imaginative invention. The diorama is intended at least in part to help museum goers understand the context of the fossils which they see in an adjacent room, but might not have the geological or paleontological education to interpret themselves. Paleontological art like this diorama is a visual language of representation used in order to communicate scientific concepts and interpretations within the field of paleontology. It is also used to communicate concepts like geologic time, extinction, evolution, and biodiversity to the public. The process of creating paleoart entails a balance between the basis of scientific information gathered from fossils and the necessary creative license to visualize what has not been directly preserved. ⁶

Fig. 3. Otozoum model. Detail from Jurassic Diorama. Photo by the author.

Otozoum, one of the dinosaurs depicted in the diorama (Figure 3), is known only from its tracks. The label text accompanying the diorama informs the viewer that this reconstruction of the dinosaur’s appearance and behavior represents “the best scientific understanding of what the Otozoum trackmaker looked like, though we may never be completely certain.” This language suggests confidence in the accuracy of the depiction according to contemporary scientific standards, but it also primes the viewer to understand the uncertainty in any interpretive depiction. As paleontological research continues, the recreation of Otozoum made for this diorama might date the reconstruction to a specific period of time or even a specific scientist, as the research which was cited in 2006 may not have remained static over the past twenty years. Paleoart documents not only what extinct organisms might have looked like, but the evolution of the field of paleontology itself. As new fossils are discovered and new research is done, the scientific interpretation which guides the visualization of extinct organisms like dinosaurs changes. Shifts in how these organisms are depicted in paleoart reflect shifts in understanding within the field.⁷ 

Representing Climate

The gradual shore of the lake depicted in the diorama appears to be an area that is sometimes covered by the water, as the sediment throughout the midground and foreground lies in wavy patterns which suggest that it has been shaped by the movement of water (Figure 4). Low vegetation with long, individual stems and single leaf fronds at the top is clumped and scattered in the sediment near the shore. Far to the left are larger bushes and shrubs. There are a few dead plants interspersed among the living, which have seemingly not survived the flooding. In the water are two carnivorous Dilophosaurus dinosaurs, and two Otozoum, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs, stand warily in the foreground vegetation to the left. The dinosaur in the foremost section of the foreground is a model, and when the viewer approaches the diorama, its prints are visible in the simulated silt ground. The body of water, layers of vegetation, and the silty ground on which the dinosaurs walk visualise enduring patterns of weather, as they indicate variation in the height of the water line of the lake, possibly with wet and dry periods or seasonal cycles. 

Fig. 4. Lakeshore sediment. Detail from Jurassic Diorama. Photo by the author.

When these conditions of imagined weather are contextualized in the framework of understanding how the fossilized dinosaur tracks displayed nearby came to be, and, on a larger scale, what the environment in which they lived might have looked like, the diorama is intended to represent a climate, by showing humans a (speculative) snapshot of a very different climate that existed in the same geographic area 190 million years ago. Since the viewer is so temporally disconnected from the world of the Jurassic trackways, this diorama attempts to capture in a single momentary visual a form of immersion in the general climatic conditions which can be extrapolated from the plants, animals, and seasonal weather recorded in the geological record.

Since the diorama represents a moment in time, though elements such as the thriving plant life and the height of the water along the shore might be indicative of broader climatic trends, the phenomena which the viewer encounters occur within the internal logic of the diorama as weather. The sun is shining, the clouds drift across the sky, and a dinosaur leaves footprints in the wet mud: all of this occurs in an instant, not across the timescale which would give a viewer a broader understanding of the long-term weather patterns which make up climate. In spite of this, the viewer is prompted by the informational texts and numerous fossil displays in the same gallery of the diorama to view these weather events not only in the context of a single moment, but in the deep time of the geological time scale, marking the relationship between the diorama’s snapshot and the longer period which it represents. The informational label in front of the diorama places its explanatory text under the heading Mesozoic Era, a geological era lasting approximately 186 million years and encompassing the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods.⁸ This labeling encourages viewers to understand the conditions depicted in the diorama as a sliver of much more enduring spans of time: the time in which fossil Otozoum tracks were made in the Jurassic, the time in which the area that is now the Connecticut River Valley was populated with tropical ferns, the time in which dinosaurs existed. 

The use of individual scenes of life to represent the eras of earth’s history is a common mode of presenting paleontological information and timelines to the public. This method of representation illustrates the passage of lengths of time far beyond the human scale of experience and the changes in the environment that have occurred over these periods by depicting a linear narrative of earth’s history as a series of individual worlds. Each period has its own climatic conditions, its own representative flora and fauna. The scale of the passage of time can be difficult to grasp conceptually, and the worlds of the past may seem entirely alien to the environments in which humans exist today.⁹ Creating a representative snapshot of a far-removed period of time provides markers based on which a viewer formulate a working understanding of that period, a world which might otherwise seem too distant from their own world to even conceive of. 

The time scales of climate change and the loss of biodiversity in the present have been said to operate beyond human experience. Engaging with the diverse time scales of past environmental conditions and changes might help foster engagement with and understanding of unfolding environmental crises in the present, as it can help visualize how drastic shifts occur across time.¹⁰ Encountering a diorama which presents a vision of a drastically different climate from a seemingly incomprehensibly distant past provokes engagement with a time scale of ecological change beyond the human experience. This provides a perspective on climate which is not limited to the short-term changes experienced within a single human lifetime, but to the large-scale ecological changes which distinguish the contemporary Connecticut River Valley and its inhabitants from the warmer Jurassic past and the warmer future.

Light, Vision, and the Diorama

The diorama is lit as if it were sunny, with bright, warm light from above shining off of the surface of the models. The lighting illuminates the background mural, but it looks harsh and unnatural on the surface of the models and the foreground, casting harsh shadows on the fake silt. This lighting of the diorama within the museum space suggests the clear view and bright lighting afforded by sunlight, as facilitated by the vibrant blue of the sky and the dispersed nature of the clouds. The bright light illuminates a scene which is obscured from human sight by millions of years, creating the image of a legible past which humans can recreate through scientific knowledge. This visual accessibility connects the “Jurassic Morning” diorama to the politics of vision and human relationships to nature embedded in the history of the museum.

Dioramas emerged as a medium in the nineteenth century during technological and social change in Europe and the United States, at a time in which a reliance on observation was made central to the practice of natural history, and trends in art emphasized the visual scrutiny of nature and aesthetics. The act of looking was central to the process of cultural and scientific education, linking access of vision to access of knowledge/power. Dioramas were controlled, visually engaging, theatrically staged encounters with nature which could simultaneously, through the research of naturalists and the use of actual animal material in taxidermy, claim a lifelike proximity to reality. Through this supposed realism, natural history dioramas of this period were intended to serve as peep-holes into the natural world, seemingly untouched by human intervention. Their fixed representations of “unspoiled” nature upheld colonialist and imperialist ideologies.¹¹

Unlike the taxidermy dioramas of the contemporary nineteenth– and twentieth- century natural world, the Jurassic diorama at the Beneski does not incorporate any “real” nature, being entirely made from reconstructions based on fossil evidence. The diorama nevertheless provides visual access to the image of a natural world unknown to and untouched by human interference, created entirely out of the human imagination in order to bring it into the realm of our understanding and control. As an educational tool, the diorama enriches public understanding of the Jurassic through the ability to see it, again connecting knowledge to visual observation. It provides a clear and unobstructed view of a past that is in fact not so clearly knowable. The “view” of Otozoum making prints in the sediment is an illusion, projecting the actually limited scope of scientific knowledge as a peep hole into the past.

Conclusion

The Jurassic diorama at the Beneski presents the viewer with a familiar view of a picturesque landscape: a sunny day at a lakeshore, the sun shining off the water and fluffy clouds drifting across the sky, with green hills rolling in the background. The landscape is inhabited by alien flora and fauna, recreated from the fossil traces left in the sedimentary rock of the ancient lakebed. The diorama combines the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown, under the same bright false sunlight. The understanding of the past that the viewer is presented with is informed by a structure of knowledge-gathering and knowledge-distribution based on empirical observation and visualization. The natural world can be understood and artificially recreated by humans’ scientific and creative endeavors, and the past climate can be seen anew through pregnant conventions of depicting weather and the environment and even inform our understanding of the future.

Footnotes

1. This work is referred to by several titles: a plaque in the museum next to the diorama names it as the Belt Memorial Diorama, while Will Sillin’s artist website lists the diorama under the title Jurassic Morning. Press and images from the Beneski Museum refer to the diorama descriptively as a “diorama of Amherst from 190 million years ago” or a “Jurassic diorama.” The label on the informational placard in front of the diorama reads “Otozoum Tracks by an Ancient Lakeshore,” but this is not used as a title in any other reference to the work. Sillin’s title for the work is not used to reference the work in any other source, nor is it commonly referred to as the Belt Memorial Diorama. In this essay, the most common descriptive title, Jurassic Diorama, will be used. ↩︎
2. “In Memoriam: Edward S. Belt (1933–2019),” News & Events, Amherst College, https://www.amherst.edu/news/memoriam/node/740015. ↩︎
3.  Pocumtuc Valley Memorial Association, “Will Sillin: Creating Paleoart for Dinosaur Track Exhibits,” 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjX7KBv36BE; Will Sillin, “Natural History,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://www.willsillin.com/natural-history. ↩︎
4. Pocumtuc Valley Memorial Association, “Will Sillin: Creating Paleoart for Dinosaur Track Exhibits,” 2021 ↩︎
5. Sillin, “Natural History.” ↩︎
6. Renee M Clary, Gary D. Rosenberg, and Dallas C. Evans, The Evolution of Paleontological Art (Geological Society of America, 2002), 1–3. ↩︎
7. Clary et al., Evolution of Paleontological Art, 1–3. ↩︎
8. “Mesozoic,” U.S. Geological Survey. accessed May 1, 2025, https://www.usgs.gov/youth-and-education-in-science/mesozoic. ↩︎
9. Chris Manias, “Pageants of Life: Conclusion and Epilogue,” in Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time, ed. Chris Manias (UCL Press, 2025), 317–318, 320–321. ↩︎
10. Manias, “Pageants,” 335. ↩︎
11. Giovanni Aloi, “Dioramas: Power, Realism, and Decorum,” in Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (Columbia University Press, 2018), 112–30; Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text, no. 11 (1984-85): 20–64. ↩︎