Andros Coral Reef Diorama
Part of Hall of Ocean Life.

Like the other habitat dioramas in the Museum, the Andros Coral Reef in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life depicts a real place at a specific point in time: a Bahamian coral reef on a June day in the 1920s.
And like the other dioramas, it features specimens gathered in the field mixed with models created from detailed artists’ sketches, re-creating a three-dimensional scene from nature to transport Museum visitors to glimpse natural wonders around the world. But the Andros Coral Reef diorama is unique in that it is the only two-level diorama in the Museum.
The project that led to this diorama's unveiling in 1935 took 12 years, beginning with a 1923 field expedition–the first of five that would bring scientists, artists, and model-makers to Andros and other Bahamian islands. Roy Waldo Miner, who oversaw the exhibit as the Museum’s curator of living invertebrates, described it as “probably the most extensive and difficult group yet attempted in this Museum, in view of the multiplicity of life presented and the character of the problems involved.”
“The ideal museum group is not merely a work of art. It is a record of living beings in their natural state...emphasizing the truth that the real unit in nature is the association rather than the individual.”
The expedition team included several specialists: painter and modeler Chris Olsen, assistant modeler Bruce C. Brunner, colorist W. H. Southwick, scientist-artist George H. Childs, glassblower Herman Mueller, and background artist Francis Lee Jaques, who painted the brilliant skyscape above the islands of Andros and Goat Cay for the diorama’s second story. They faced one major challenge: how to accurately observe and record nature on the ocean floor at a time before self-contained underwater diving gear. In the end, the team relied in part on an ingenious “submarine tube” that stretched down, accordion-like, from beneath a boat to a glass-fronted chamber, from which they could take still pictures and movies of the reef and sketch the corals and their colors from life.
Underwater scenes were also recorded with cameras in watertight boxes—and even painted in oils by Chris Olsen, who dove and painted preliminary sketches of the sunlight-dappled reef and its waters on an oiled canvas stretched over a sheet of glass on a weighted easel. On the fifth and final expedition, Miner himself dove down with Museum-prepared models to compare them to living specimens and was, he wrote, “greatly gratified … that they could not be told apart when viewed at arm’s length.”
The team also made coral collections, primarily of the aptly named elkhorn, staghorn, and fan species, shipping specimens back to the Museum embedded in sponge clippings for safe transport. (Find out more about this collection in the video below).
Preserving the Dry Coral Collection – Transcript
[MUSIC BEGINS]
[The Museum's video logo appears over blurred footage of a colorful coral reef, followed by the title of the video, "Preserving the Dry Coral Collection".]
[The footage of the coral reef comes into focus, and the word "CNIDARIANS" appears with the phonetic pronunciation written underneath it: "NAHY-DAIR-EE-UHNS". We then see the first speaker on camera.]
ESTEFANíA RODRíGUEZ (Associate Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History):
Corals are Cnidarians. Cnidarians is a group of animals, around 10,000 species more or less, relatively simple, but very diverse, with many, many forms, including jellyfish, corals, anemones.
[As she says each of the forms of cnidarians, footage of that animal appears on screen.]
RODRíGUEZ: Stony corals are the corals that everybody knows.
[A large stony coral specimen with many curving branches sits in front of a black background. The words "stony coral" appears at the bottom of the screen with an arrow pointing towards the specimen.]
RODRíGUEZ: They are colonies of very little polyps. Basically sacks with tentacles that live in the sea floor,
[A close-up photo of pink/orange polyps with translucent tentacles appears on the screen with the words "CORAL POLYPS" and arrows pointing from the word to various polyps in the picture underneath.]
RODRíGUEZ: and they have the ability of producing an exoskeleton.
[Footage of live coral polyps visible on large pieces of flat coral in a reef.]
RODRíGUEZ: Like that, they produce the coral reefs that everybody knows and that are very, very important because they sustain a lot of other animals.
[An underwater camera drifts slowly across a colorful coral reef with many specimens in shades of greens and purples.]
RODRíGUEZ: They are the base for the whole community and they actually make deserts into very biodiverse coral reefs.
[Three consecutive shots of fish of many shapes and colors swimming amongst corals in different reefs around the world.]
CHRISTINE JOHNSON(Curatorial Association, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History): In our coral collection here at the American Museum of Natural History, we have about a little over 4,000 specimens from all over the world. The collection dates back to about 1873.
[Three consecutive shots of Christine Johnson opening specimen drawers from various cabinets around the room, followed by a tilting shot of the inside of a specimen cabinet with many pieces of dry coral.]
JOHNSON: Some of these collections were donated by amateur collectors or some researchers, or they were considered by-catch. So, people would go out on expeditions for other things, and would bring back pieces of coral.
[Archival black-and-white footage of a woman swimming near a coral reef]
JOHNSON: And then there was an expedition to bring back a reef and to replicate a reef within the museum.
[Archival black and white footage of scientists collecting coral specimens in the wild and then assembling a display of coral at the Museum]
JOHNSON: And you can see that in the Hall of Ocean Life. It's a spectacular display.
[Footage of the Museum's coral reef diorama in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, followed by dry coral specimens on a cart in a lab setting.]
JOHNSON: But then we have specimens that are for researcher use only.
RODRíGUEZ: The collection of dry corals at the AMNH is important because it's old. That means that we can travel in time and see how the oceans were 200 years ago.
[Footage of a modern-day coral reef with fish swimming above fades into a 200-year old woodblock print of life on the sea floor.]
JOHNSON:
Nowadays, as people may be aware, coral is becoming increasingly endangered.
We decided that we really needed to put this effort into rehousing the coral, so that it's available to the outside world.
[One long shot of coral specimens arranged in their storage cabinets, with labels indicating that they are protected species.]
REZES: (Coral Rehousing Project Intern, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History):
So we are currently six months in to our ongoing three-year project to clean, document and photograph the entirety of the dry coral collection at AMNH.
[Quick shots of someone cleaning a coral specimen, cleaning a specimen's label, and photographing a specimen.]
REZES:The way that we clean the coral is with a vacuum and a soft brush, right now we're using watercolor brushes. Who knew, very effective.
[A woman carefully holds a small vacuum hose up to a coral specimen while brushing dust off of the specimen into the vacuum.]
REZES:After we're all done cleaning, we take the time to photograph all of the specimens with all of their original labels from the donor.
[Emily arranges a specimen and its labels for photography and takes a picture.]
REZES:And this is because they can be some of the most detailed sources of locality information, and the date it was collected and the collector and things like that.
[A single specimen and its original label lie against a gray background. As Emily lists the type of information given by the label, that part of the label is highlighted.]
REZES:Most of the stuff that I've worked with before is an artwork that somebody has crafted in some way, whereas here, it was once living and it was grown and nobody has shaped it into this form.
[Three consecutive shots of coral specimens highlight the unique shapes stony corals form as they grow.]
REZES:My favorite species that I've worked with so far is Acropora Spicifera.
[A photograph of a large Acropora Spicfera specimen on a black background appears. The words "ACROPORA SPICIFERA" appear in the corner with an arrow pointing to the specimen.]
REZES:It's almost like lace, and if you get really close it kind of looks like a forest.
[Details of the specimen shown in the previous photograph]
JOHNSON:
One of my most favorite pieces is this single piece of black coral. This piece is just so beautiful and sleek and elegant.
[A slow tilting shot along the length of a piece of long, thin, black coral. The words "BLACK CORAL" appear in the bottom corner with an arrow pointing to the specimen.]
RODRíGUEZ:
Corals are very beautiful, so I don't think I have a favorite one. Many of the pieces are amazing.
[A close-up, detailed shot of a stony coral specimen starts out blurred and comes into sharp focus.
JOHNSON:
By researchers coming here, carbon-dating the coral, and also looking at how environmental conditions have affected the coral, this will absolutely help us understand the fate of corals and how to protect corals going forward in the future.
[A shot of stony coral specimens in storage cabinets fades into footage of a living coral reef.]
Back in New York, the corals were cleaned and given a thin coating of beeswax, colored to simulate the living animal tissue that covers them in life. To reconstruct the reef itself, 8 tons of structural steel was arranged in an elaborate armature to support the corals and other marine life in exactly the position in which they had been found.
“The ideal museum group is not merely a work of art,” Miner wrote in Natural History magazine in 1931. “It is a record of living beings in their natural state and environment, depicted in their proper relations to their surroundings, and emphasizing the truth that the real unit in nature is the association rather than the individual.”
A visitor favorite for decades, the diorama underwent an update in 2003, with a thorough cleaning and installation of new fiber optic lighting to reveal its vibrant original colors and detail—and to restore an invaluable window into a thriving marine habitat in the early 20th century.
Today, coral reefs, which are home to a quarter of all known marine species, face multiple threats worldwide, including coral disease, bleaching from warming waters, overfishing, pollution, and extreme weather.
Read about how the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) helped to extend marine protected areas in the Bahamas.