Bell Museum: Caribou by Tom Nelson

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At the Bell Museum of Natural History, two floors of dioramas display all of Minnesota's habitats, along with the birds, animals, plants and insects that populate the state. Constructed between 1920 and the late 1940s, the Bell Museum's dioramas illustrate what Minnesota was like before the ax and plow.
www.bellmuseum.org /
Woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus) are known as reindeer in northern Europe. They were once common in the coniferous forests and bogs of northern Minnesota. They declined rapidly due to excessive hunting, logging, and forest fires during the late 1880s. The loss of mature forests also allowed deer to spread throughout northern Minnesota, bringing with them a parasitic lung worm fatal to caribou. By the 1920s there was only one small herd left in the bogs and fens around Red Lake. Despite an attempt to introduce Canadian animals, the last Minnesota caribou died in the early 1940s.