The Natural History Museum’s Diorama Challenge Asks People to Recreate Wildlife Scenes at Home

Over the past couple of months, you’ve probably seen people recreating works of art at home in response to the Getty Museum’s challenge. Now, another museum has launched a similar challenge of its own. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is inviting you to try recreating its wildlife dioramas and sharing them with the tag #dioramachallenge.

To kick off the challenge, the museum made a sample recreation: four potatoes on a piece of styrofoam that somehow look exactly like a family of walruses on an iceberg.

It’s a hard act to follow, but the entries to the challenge have been funny and creative. Some of the best are the most abstract. We’d never thought spray bottles looked much like Arabian oryx, but now we can’t unsee it.

Using elephant figurines to represent elephants might seem obvious, but if you look closely, you’ll see a couple other species standing in. It’s all about the composition.

All you need is a blue blanket to evoke the ocean.

A blanket can also become a mountain, and so can a hat!

A cucumber and avocado as hippos and wooden kitchen utensils as fallen trees? A+.

As they do in the Getty challenge, dogs feature heavily in the diorama challenge. This one is nailing it as fourth-wall-breaking mountain goat.

This one makes quite a majestic wolf.

With a headband and a skirt, this dog has become a bongo.

This pomeranian is bravely playing the part of a fallen triceratops.

If you try making your own diorama scene, tag @NHMLA and #DioramaChallenge.