Into the Congo in 1909
The first scientists from the American Museum of Natural History to explore the Central African rain forest, Herbert Lang and James Chapin, set out in 1909 and were gone for five years. They shipped fifty-four tons of material back to New York, in crates carried through the jungle by tens of thousands of local people over the years.

Eighty-Seven Years Later
In 1996, a twenty-person crew from the American Museum of Natural History went to the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve to research and collect materials for a life-size diorama of the forest in the new Hall of Biodiversity. A small number of scientists came along on the expedition, "to make sure that we sampled the biodiversity and sampled it properly," explains Dr. Joel Cracraft, curator of ornithology at the museum.