About

The Harvest Foundation of the Piedmont Great Hall offers a wide array of displays and specimens under a towering 40-foot ceiling. 

Two casts of fossil skeletons dominate The Great Hall. The theropod dinosaur, Allosaurus, is about 140 million years old. This specimen is from north central Wyoming where Museum scientists have been conducting annual excavations on federal lands since 1998.

The 14 million year old baleen whale specimen suspended from the ceiling of The Great Hall was collected by Museum scientists at a quarry in Caroline County and is named Eobalaenoptera. It is the oldest known member of the group of whales that includes the fin whales. The best known fin whale is the Blue whale, the largest creature that has ever lived.

Visitors to The Great Hall can also view VMNH scientists at work through windows looking into three labs. The Elster Foundation Vertebrate Paleontology Lab is where VMNH researchers prepare whales, dinosaurs and other vertebrate fossils, including over 700 dinosaur bones stored in the Museum's collections from excavations in Wyoming. The Museum's archaeologist, Dr. Elizabeth Moore, works in the Archaeology Lab identifying, measuring and cataloging thousands of bones, potsherds and other artifacts recovered from a number of sites on the east coast.

The Scanning Electron Microscopy Lab includes a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which allows researchers to magnify objects up to several thousand times life-size.  This allows scientists to look at fine details of surface structures of animals, plants, and cultural artifacts.  SEM’s are also used to look at details of hairs and fibers in forensic investigations.