Dioramas were a late-19th-century development before wildlife colour film and photography took hold. Some museums began advancing from monotonous rows of cabinets displaying stuffed animals and placing them within three-dimensional settings and painted backdrops to convey a picture of creatures in their natural habitats. There were once dioramas at the British Museum, but few survive today. The habitat dioramas at the Powell-Cotton Museum, unaltered since their creation around the turn of the 20th century, are now a rarity.
Maj Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940) was a traveller, hunter, collector and naturalist. He made 28 collecting expeditions to Africa and Asia between 1887 and 1939. Although these started out as conventional game-hunting trips, the results often displayed as mounted heads back at Quex House, he gradually developed a deeper scientific interest in the animals, as well as in the lives of the tribespeople of the lands he travelled through.
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