In some instances, all that remained was a label; a collection of these makes up a large part of one of the display cases.

“We looked at what we had, and it was very fragmentary,” Ms. Benedict said. “It was this very strange set of things.”

The project began in the spring of 2013 with an offhand comment by Dr. Lubar.

“Steve casually mentioned that Brown once had a natural history museum, but it was thrown into the Seekonk River dump,” Ms. Benedict said.

That prompted some initial research, followed by meetings among students interested in taking on the project. (In all, 10 graduate students participated to varying degrees.) “We started to get to know the museum through the descriptions of what was there and imagined what this place must have been like,” said Elizabeth Crawford, who is midway through the two-year graduate program.

The group decided to contact Mark Dion, an artist who combines scientific disciplines and methods with history in his installations and other projects. “This is so exactly what he does,” Dr. Lubar said.

Mr. Dion became an artist in residence and was involved in all facets of the project, including the recreation of Jenks’s office. It is an admittedly fanciful display, because all they knew of the office came from a description written by one of his students. But a large part of the space is devoted to taxidermy, which by all indications was Jenks’s first love (and also part of his undoing — he became ill from exposure to arsenic, which was used as a preservative at the time).

Mr. Dion also had a hand in the recreation of 88 vanished museum objects, which are displayed in a small room. The work of about 60 artists, they include a stuffed Pomeranian, a Gila monster and six-pointed starfishes, and oddities like nails from the coffin of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. The artists were given free rein except for color.