The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York are some of its most popular attractions, a marriage of art and science transmuted into lifelike encounters with snarling jaguars, rapt penguins and blasé zebras standing rump-first to the glass. Even in the CGI age, their realism is startling. The earliest dioramas owe a debt to Carl Akeley, a sculptor, taxidermist, inventor and big-game hunter who worked at the museum from about 1909 to 1926. Akeley pioneered a method of scooping plaster and papier-mâché over wire armatures to create lifelike creatures and their habitats. Playing around with a hose, a hill of dry concrete and some forced air, he also invented sprayable concrete, a material that could bond to metal-mesh walls and ceilings, enacting a supersized version of sculpting that would later revolutionize the swimming pool industry, among others.

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