Exhibit reveals science history in Dyche Hall

Collections on display for centennial celebration

Research collections of the world’s animals and plants that span the past 100 years—and the discoveries they generated—are featured in a new temporary exhibit at the Natural History Museum.

“Life in Dyche: A Century of Science” commemorates the 1903 completion of Dyche Hall, the signature building of the KU museum. Most of the exhibited specimens are on display to the public for the first time. They have been handpicked from the museum’s inventory of about 7 million plant and animal specimens used for research and education on the origin and nature of life on earth.

Plants and animals collected for research purposes are prepared and conserved in very different ways from those intended for display. Visitors will see beautiful translucent frogs, fish, snakes, salamanders and lizards: Their tissues are transparent and their bones and cartilage dyed red and blue so scientists can study the anatomy of the skeletons. Visitors can learn how botanists study plant specimens that are folded, pressed, dried and glued to boards to understand the plants’ structure and evolutionary relationships.

Among the oldest animals in the exhibit are a walrus and a narwhal from an 1895 expedition to Greenland led by Lewis Lindsay Dyche, after whom Dyche Hall was named. Dyche was an early 20th-century explorer, scientist and taxidermist who was a curator and faculty member at KU. The oldest plant in the exhibit is an oxeye daisy collected by KU’s first chancellor, Francis Huntington Snow, before he came to the university. Snow, an avid entomologist and naturalist, started the museum’s collection of insects, some of which also are in the exhibit.

Dyche Hall is one of the university’s most recognizable buildings. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building houses the museum’s public exhibits and several research divisions. Other research divisions and collections are housed in Snow Hall, Lindley Hall, Lippincott Hall, Haworth Hall and the R.L. McGregor Herbarium on West Campus.