Stephen Christopher Quinn is surely an artist with a most timely calling: His work draws national attention to our vanishing wilderness and to the urgency of wildlife and environmental preservation. As the senior project manager at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, Quinn is the artist/designer/scientist behind the legendary dioramas at the museum. His richly illustrated and meticulously researched new book, Windows on Nature, reveals the history and techniques used by painters, sculptors, and taxidermists in the creation of these “early forms of virtual reality” (as Quinn calls them), as well as the exploits of the naturalists, conservationists, and explorers who made the exhibits possible.

Quinn’s 30-year history at the museum began in 1974 when he graduated from the Ridgewood School in northern New Jersey (he majored in painting, sculpture, and—as a nod to practicality —advertising graphics) and was hired there as an apprentice. His first task was to collect marsh plants in the Hackensack meadowlands for the wood stork diorama in the Hall of North American Birds. Quinn’s concern for wildlife and the environment was spurred by his love of nature and his dismay over the gradual disappearance of wetlands near his boyhood home through expanding suburban development. Even as a 4-year-old visiting the museum with his parents, he had pointed to the dioramas and said he wanted to work with them.

Quinn says he has the best job in the world … and he really means it. “It is a noble profession. The stars and planets aligned here and allowed me to pursue my passions.” Vacations with his family differ little from expeditions for work: “Every year we take a big camping trip somewhere in North America.”

The museum has continuously maintained a team of artists since 1885; its first dioramas opened to the public in 1902. From their inception, the museum’s habitat dioramas commanded public and political attention, resulting in the enactment of laws to protect wildlife, starting with Teddy Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island as the nation’s first Federal Bird Reserve in 1903.

The museum’s habitat dioramas have an enduring appeal— 4 million visitors annually view these powerful reminders of the beauty and fragility of nature. Quinn says that for most of us, these encounters with distant lands and exotic animals will be the closest we will ever come to actually experiencing wild places and animals in nature, “yet these exhibits provide us with such an accurate illusion and compelling experience that they shape our understanding and appreciation of the real natural world.”

I had always wondered about the mysterious techniques used to create these incredibly lifelike scenarios, and then I had the opportunity to uncover their secrets from the master himself. “It’s a bit like being a sorcerer’s apprentice,” says Quinn. “The components of the dioramas are about 50-percent real and 50-percent artifice. It is significant that a scientific institution depends on art and illusion to teach science.”

TOP: Sean Murtha from the AMNH Exhibition Department paints a new background mural for the renovated dolphin diorama in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.