The Harvest Foundation of the Piedmont Great Hall welcomes visitors with a vast assortment of fascinating displays. Visitors are greeted by the enormous skeleton of Allosaurus dinosaur, while a skeleton of a 14 million-year-old baleen whale hangs beneath a vaulted ceiling of skylights.  Windows offer a peek into the museum's active laboratories where researchers and volunteers work, and award-winning displays and graphic presentations greet visitors at every turn.

Pteranodon

A skeleton of a Pteranodon suspended from the towering 40-foot ceiling of the museum’s Harvest Foundation Great Hall greets visitors to the Museum. The specimen has a 20-foot wing-span, and is angled to apear as though it is diving toward visitors standing on the bridge overlooking both the Museum's lobby and The Great Hall. The Pteranodon lived around 89 to 70 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, and was one of the largest types of pterosaur – flying reptiles – with a wingspan of up to 30 feet. Pteranodon had toothless beaks, similar to those of modern birds. The creatures were reptiles, but not dinosaurs. However, dinosaurs and pterosaurs may have been closely related, and most paleontologists place them together in the group Ornithodira, or "bird necks".

Allosaurus

The theropod dinosaur, Allosaurus, is about 140 million years old. This specimen is from north central Wyoming where Museum scientists have been conducting annual excavations on federal lands since 1998.

Stromatolite

An exhibit featuring a 500-million-year-old stromatolite specimen is also on display in The Great Hall. The stromatolite, which measures 6 feet in diameter and weighs over 2 tons, garnered national attention after its discovery in May 2008 at the Boxley Blue Ridge Quarry in Roanoke, Virginia.  While moving a pile of loose rock, quarry employees noticed the mysterious object, but were unable to identify it.  When the quarry’s geologist identified it as a stromatolite, museum scientists were asked to confirm the analysis.  When they arrived to the quarry, not only did they confirm it as a stromatolite, but it was found to be one of the most complete stromatolite specimens in the world. Although fragments and sections of stromatolites are fairly common, it is very rare for a whole stromatolite head to be collected intact. This specimen is particularly unusual because the top surface of the head is very well preserved.

Stromatolites are among the earliest known life forms and are important in helping scientists understand more about environments that existed in the past.  They are a mound produced in shallow water by mats of algae that trap mud and sand particles. Another mat grows on the trapped sediment layer and this traps another layer of sediment, growing gradually over time. Stromatolites can grow to heights of a meter or more. They are uncommon today, but their fossils are among the earliest evidence for living things. The oldest stromatolites have been dated at 3.46 billion years old. They were discovered in 1999 in Western Australia, near the town of Marble Bar.

Eobalaenoptera

The 14 million year old baleen whale specimen suspended from the ceiling of The Great Hall was collected by Museum scientists at a quarry in Caroline County and is named Eobalaenoptera. It is the oldest known member of the group of whales that includes the fin whales. The best known fin whale is the Blue whale, the largest creature that has ever lived.

Scientific Labs

Visitors to The Great Hall can also view VMNH scientists at work through windows looking into three labs. The Elster Foundation Vertebrate Paleontology Lab is where VMNH researchers prepare whales, dinosaurs and other vertebrate fossils, including over 700 dinosaur bones stored in the Museum's collections from excavations in Wyoming. The Museum's archaeologist, Dr. Elizabeth Moore, works in the Archaeology Lab identifying, measuring and cataloging thousands of bones, potsherds and other artifacts recovered from a number of sites on the east coast. The Scanning Electron Microscopy Lab includes a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which allows researchers to magnify objects up to several thousand times life-size.  This allows scientists to look at fine details of surface structures of animals, plants, and cultural artifacts.  SEM’s are also used to look at details of hairs and fibers in forensic investigations.

Special Exhibit Column Cases

The Great Hall features six, grand column cases that feature special exhibts on a rotating basis.  Currently these cases host the special exhibit Clues to the Past: Archaeology in Virginia through July 31, 2010.

The exhibit, which showcases specimens up to 11,500 years old, provides insight into the field of archaeology, including the scientific processes and excavation methods.  In addition, the exhibit gives visitors a look into four separate archaeological sites that represent different time periods throughout Virginia's history.

The exhibit consists of 5 column cases, each presenting a different area within the field archaeology.  Visitors first discover the basics of what archaeology is, the different archaeological methods, and how scientific conclusions are formed.