Sneak Peek: Exhibit Installation Begins at the San Mateo County History Museum

Have you ever wondered what lived in the Bay Area before the hippies of the 1960s and the tech bros of today? That’s the question the curatorial and interpretive team at the San Mateo County History Museum set out to explore in their first-ever natural history exhibition. In Digging Into the Past: The Peninsula’s Natural History, visitors will get to encounter the megafauna that roamed the Bay Area during the Miocene and Pleistocene. 

Ideum has been working with the museum’s team, along with specialists in sculpting, mount making, and fabricating mechanical interactives, to bring the story of the ancient Peninsula to life. 

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Collaborative Exhibit Design, from Concept to Reality

We began work on this project early this year, moving through accelerated concept and schematic design phases to establish the gallery’s overall look and feel. Early in the project, Ideum hosted members of the San Mateo County History Museum team at our design studio in Corrales, NM, for a two-day workshop. During the workshop, we collaboratively decided the fundamentals of how we wanted the space to feel to visitors, and this became our guiding light as we worked through the subsequent iterations of concept and schematic design. Together with the museum’s team, we developed a design that brings the ancient peninsula to life, and invites visitors to imagine what California looked like millions of years ago. 

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Custom Museum Fabrication: Sculptures and Specimens

One of the gallery’s most eye-catching features will be three bespoke sculptures, produced in collaboration with our partners at Five Ton Monkey. These life-size, 1:1 sculptures will give visitors a chance to see some of the region’s most iconic mammals up close and personal. A giant short-faced bear, a Columbian mammoth, and a northern elephant seal will tell stories of the Peninsula’s past and present, giving patrons the opportunity to better understand the area’s biodiversity, and how the region has changed over time. 

Alongside the sculptures, the museum is displaying a skeleton cast of Neoparadoxia, an ancient mammal that was excavated locally, and remains one of the Bay Area’s most unique residents. 

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Interactive Exhibits Where Science Meets Play

In addition to the gallery’s wild centerpieces, Ideum is designing and developing two custom interactive games to help visitors tackle the trickier topics covered in this exhibition. 

• Build-your-own creature game: Visitors are introduced to the concepts of convergent and divergent evolution, and can explore which adaptations help species survive and which lead them to possible extinction. Paper dolls of fantastical critters made using the different components of megafauna featured in the gallery add a playful element to a complex scientific theory. 
• Elephant seal food chain game: Players explore the food chain of contemporary northern elephant seals, allowing them to get a sense of how ecosystems rely on the various species that inhabit them to remain healthy and stable. 

Both interactive exhibits are designed to be played on Ideum’s Reader Rail kiosks.

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A Museum Experience Rooted in Local Discovery

Through this collaboration, Ideum, our partners, and the San Mateo County History Museum are creating an experience that connects visitors with the Peninsula’s distant past. Combining striking sculptures, specimens and objects from the museum’s collection, engaging exhibit design, and stories of local discoveries, Digging Into the Past: The Peninsula’s Natural History invites visitors to explore the world beneath their feet and discover how the Bay Area has changed over time. 

The exhibit opens to the public in early November, with an opening reception on Saturday, November 7.

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