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A journey through time
Exhibition Concept
Overview
Prehistoric Pathways is an exhibition design concept that explores deep time through immersive environments, wayfinding, large-scale graphics, and interactive storytelling. The project was designed to guide visitors through changing ecosystems while balancing educational clarity, spectacle, and spatial flow.
The Goal
The goal of the project was to create an exhibit experience that felt visually dramatic while still helping visitors understand time period changes, major environmental shifts, and key prehistoric life.
Because the concept spans multiple eras and large architectural spaces, wayfinding and visual hierarchy became just as important as the environmental storytelling itself.
Master Plan
Each major zone was treated as its own visual environment, using changes in color, scale, lighting direction, and structural framing to help visitors feel the transition between eras.
Devonian Period
The Devonian is the first point in the exhibit where the space fully opens to two levels, surrounding visitors with armored fish, giant sea scorpions, early sharks, and animals that would make the defining move toward life on land.
This zone was designed to feel expansive, strange, and transitional—capturing both the spectacle of prehistoric marine ecosystems and the evolutionary significance of the period.
Permian Period
Upon entering the Permian, visitors move into a large free-roam atrium populated by some of Earth’s most unfamiliar creatures. Stationary models and animatronics bring these early stem-mammals to life at close range.
As guests leave the space, the mood shifts into the Great Dying, where the architecture and graphics narrow into a darker, more dramatic environmental transition centered on collapse, extinction, and recovery.
Triassic Period
On the descent toward the Jurassic, guests move into the thriving seas of the Triassic, home to some of the largest marine reptiles ever discovered. A life-sized Ichthyotitan model acts as the dramatic anchor of the space.
The stair sequence was designed to make visitors feel physically surrounded by motion and scale, with marine life overhead and around them as they move between levels.
Jurassic Period
This smaller detour takes visitors through a dark nighttime forest inhabited by famous predators like Dilophosaurus. The goal was to create tension through limited visibility, sound, and environmental framing rather than scale alone.
Compared to the openness of earlier rooms, this sequence compresses the experience into a more focused, suspense-driven moment.
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Cretaceous Period
The Cretaceous Atrium is the largest area of the experience and acts as the central climax of the exhibit. Spanning three floors and multiple regional environments, it presents the peak of dinosaur diversity through large-scale architecture, dramatic sightlines, and layered circulation paths.
Visitors move from canyon systems in Mongolia to nighttime forest scenes and into the massive atrium itself, anchored by a life-sized Argentinosaurus and other large focal encounters.
Interactive Elements
Throughtout the experience, small interactive tables are placed around the walkways for guests to learn more about creatures on the smaller size (smaller than your hand) that wouldn't be seen in the vast environments with larger creatures. These tables will allow guests to interact with the offical 3D model of the animal used in the exibit, provide facts about how it lived, ate, and moved, and even provide animations for guests to play to see the creature in action.
Signage & Wayfinding
Signage, large-format graphics, and spatial framing were used together to make each section readable at a distance while still rewarding closer interaction.
This helped the project feel cohesive across multiple floors and exhibit zones rather than like a series of disconnected displays.
