Stephen Christopher Quinn took a group on a short expedition Wednesday to see elephants, buffalo, gorillas, and antelope. No roars or stampeding hooves were heard; the creatures stood uncannily still. But Mr. Quinn brought them to life on a museum tour as he discussed his book, “Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History,” published by Abrams in association with the museum.

Dioramas have been called an art that conceals in order to reveal. Are they a craft, like painted pictures in a landscape tradition? Are they classifiable as exploration, virtual reality, installation, performance art, or sophisticated scientific illustrations? All of the above, suggested Abrams’s editor in chief, Eric Himmel. Museum chairman Lewis Bernard noted that dioramas are a form of art for which there is no art school in the country.

“When I first suggested to my colleagues that we pursue the museum to do a book about the dioramas,” Mr. Himmel said, “one of them raised the question whether the dioramas in photographs might be indistinguishable” from photographs taken of nature.

But, he continued, “The dioramas are to me indisputably works of art. They are composed and posed into memorable images that stay in the mind.” Mr. Himmel recalled having said to his colleague that in dioramas, one is seeing “not nature, but pictures of nature, the kind of pictures we’ll need more of in this century, made by artful scientists and scientific artists.”

Mr. Quinn explained that the dioramas are not generalized depictions of an example of a species, but are exact replicas of specific individuals that were collected.

There are three applied arts that go into making a diorama: curved painting that creates the illusion of place and distance; three-dimensional foreground elements; and the sculptural taxidermy. The real magic of the diorama is the place where the three-dimensional foreground meets the two-dimensional background, he said. This is called the “tie-in.”

Mr. Quinn described the decadelong process of working on the book, and thanked the museum’s library staff for letting him take over a storeroom for a year to lay out images and materials. He related anecdotes about the explorers, conservationists, naturalists, background painters, and taxidermists who made the dioramas.

One such story related to sculptor, explorer, and taxidermist Carl Akeley, who was mauled and nearly killed by an elephant on Mount Kenya. During his lengthy convalescence, Akeley is said to have dreamed of an African hall at the museum that would be dedicated to preserving Africa and telling the story of the habitats of Africa.

These and other great dioramas, Mr. Quinn said, were tools for teaching natural science and nurturing environmental awareness. They are portals to a larger world. “Will they become a record of a world before we despoil it? Or will we nurture the wonder and beauty and diversity of wilderness and wildlife that they so beautifully display?” he asked.

For his presentation, Mr. Quinn stood in the African Hall with its imposing elephants in the center. Under a tall ceiling, the room is ringed by dark marble that frames 28 glowing windows. He pointed out how the glass in each diorama is canted down to throw reflections down rather than directly back at the viewer’s eyes.

The tour began at the gorilla diorama, showing a scene from the Belgian Congo. Mr. Quinn said Akeley saw the opportunity to be the first museum professional to visit that site and describe the animals accurately.

Mr. Quinn told the words that Akeley wrote:

He was a magnificent creature with the face of an amiable giant, who would do no harm except perhaps in self-defense or in defense of his friends. Of the two, I was the savage and the aggressor.

Akeley was instrumental in establishing the first national park in all of Africa, Mr. Quinn said.

But dioramas – and dioramists -aren’t all business all the time. If you look closely in the gorilla diorama, you’ll find a barely perceptible eastern chipmunk – right there in the republic of Congo.

It’s an older version of “Where’s Waldo?” that was intended as a joke played by a background painter, George Frederick Mason, on his colleague, James Perry Wilson, while they were creating the work.

One the tour, freelancer and museum-goer Marianne Wiesinger noticed that one can look at these animals in the eye, as one never could in real life. Museum admission may be steep nowadays, she said, but it’s a lot less than the cost of an African safari.

gshapiro@nysun.com