This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Guiding a visitor along the 22-foot-high, 406-foot-long curtain of glass fronting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit hall, Caitlin Colleary spots a familiar face — one from which three large horns are protruding.
“Triceratops is here!” Colleary, a paleontologist, exclaims.
Yes, Trudy the Triceratops (as she has been nicknamed by Colleary and her colleagues) arrived a few days early in her new home — all six tons of her, perched on a platform amid tarps and wood scattered around the floor of the new hall, still eight months away from completion.
Trudy — a casting from the American Museum of Natural History in New York — was the first of her prehistoric pals to be moved into this new location in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From here, she can stand, with a menacing look, brandishing her distinctive, three-foot-long horns.
Trudy has been placed by the glass wall of the 50,000-square-foot exhibit hall called Dynamic Earth, one of two halls under construction at the museum, and scheduled to open in December. The $150 million renovation features a second, 25,000-square-foot hall called Evolving Life, not to mention a redesign of the museum’s facade.
It’s the most significant makeover of the 104-year-old museum since it moved from downtown Cleveland to its current location in the University Circle neighborhood, near the campus of Case Western Reserve University, in 1955.
