In recent years, biology's had a bit of a love affair with extremophiles, microbes that manage to live in boiling hot springs, deep mines, or other incredibly harsh environments. These organisms are often trotted out as models for the sort of life we might be able to find on other bodies in our Solar System, places that seem to rule out any prospect of complex animal life.

But a new exhibit opening at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) called "Life at the Limits" provides a nice reminder that animals can survive in environments we might expect were only hospitable to bacteria—and manage a wide range of extremes of other sorts.

Introducing the exhibit, AMNH President Ellen Futter cited examples like the tardigrade, a microscopic animal (represented by human-sized models in the museum) that can be boiled, frozen, dried out for 10 years, and then brought back to life with a bit of water and moderate temperature. Or the army ant, which can lay 120,000 eggs a month. Or the Hercules beetle, which can lift 80 times its own weight. Or the elephant seal, which has dives that are over a kilometer deep and last for two hours.

It's hard to put an elephant seal (which can weigh up to 4,000 kilograms) into a museum in Manhattan, much less have museum goers along for one of its dives. So the challenge of an exhibit like this is how to make a compelling display for what Futter called "ambassadors of the great story of evolution." (The curator of paleontology at the museum, Michael Novacek, echoed Darwin when referring to the creatures as "endless forms most weird.")

The museum has handled this problem in a number of ways. Photos and videos are distributed throughout the exhibit, along with punchy text that tells people a bit about what makes each animal special. For example, the text for the image of the Ruppell's vulture notes that we know it has extreme altitude tolerance because it has run into jet aircraft at 37,000 feet. The videos are compelling and include footage of one of my personal favorites, the mating display of the peacock spider.

Video: A look at the exhibit, along with some of the people behind it. Shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn

There are also models of many of the animals on display (and at least one plant, the enormous corpse flower). Some, like the elephant seal and hammerhead shark, are life-sized; others, like the Hercules beetle and tardigrade, have been blown up massively—kids are encouraged to climb all over the beetle.

But a key draw of the exhibit will undoubtedly be the cases where the museum environment can house one of the creatures themselves. These include the axolotl, a salamander that's capable of regenerating lost limbs, and a chambered nautilus, a shelled creature with tentacles that's been roaming the seas for roughly half a billion years. There are also mantis shrimp, which are studied both because of their visual system (they've got 12 photoreceptor genes compared to our four) and their claws' punching ability, which is fast enough to cause cavitation. Not all of them were especially active during Ars' visit, but it's still a bit of a thrill to see an organism you've read about countless times.

In the end, the exhibit does a good job of showcasing what Futter termed "persistence and tenacity of life on Earth." Pretty much everywhere we've looked—Antarctica, the deepest ocean trenches, and the peaks of the Himalayas—there are a handful of animals that have found a home. In the spaces between, there are fantastic forms and astonishing behaviors, all of which the museum documents.

In some ways, the exhibit comes across a bit like natural history trivia; the brief text snippets on many displays simply describe a wondrous feature or two, without going into the detail of how or why. That's understandable; in many cases, we don't fully understand the details of a given feature, or our understanding is exceedingly technical.

Mark Siddall, who works in the museum's invertebrate zoology division, told Ars that this is one of the reasons we tend to focus on microbial extremophiles. It's relatively easy to sequence and assemble a bacterial genome and make some inferences about how it adapts to its environment biochemically. By contrast, sequencing an animal genome is generally harder and only the first step. Figuring out how animals adapt, which may involve a mixture of biochemistry and complex behavior, is much, much harder. It's not at all clear what genes to look at to understand something like the bowerbird's nest-building.

Even if all the details are lacking, however, the exhibit does a fantastic job of introducing people to species they may want to learn more about. Or, to borrow Futter's words again, it reminds people of "the astonishing power of reality and the real thing."

The exhibit will open to the public on Saturday, April 4.