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Field Museum Specimens Special Exhibit


deutscheben

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This last weekend I was in Chicago for a short getaway and I had Saturday afternoon to myself. The weather was absolutely beautiful, so I decided to make my way down to the museum campus. I was able to get down to that portion of the lakefront in time to catch the tail-end of the Chicago March for Science, around 40,000 scientists and their allies rallying in support of science funding and science-based policy, and also in defense of the environment. It was a boisterous crowd of all ages and wonderful to see.

 

The ending point of the March was right in front of the Field Museum of Natural History, so I decided to head inside. I grew up in the greater Chicagoland area, so I have been coming to the Field for 30 or so years now, but in years past, I must admit, my interest was always mainly in the dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures- I never paid nearly as much attention to the earlier flora and fauna. Now that I have been collecting from Mazon Creek and other Carboniferous sites for about a year and a half, I thought I might view the exhibits in a new light.

 

The museum was crowded, as many other marchers had the same idea to spend the afternoon in this iconic "temple of science". I decided to check out one of the special exhibits up at the moment, titled "Specimens: Unlocking the Secrets of Life" , a sort of behind-the-scenes look at the value of the museum's vast collections and how they have been used to make scientific breakthroughs. This special exhibit is scheduled to run until January 7, 2018, and I highly recommend it to anyone in the area!

 

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Well at least I can say I like the architecture, suitable for any sort of temple (and better than our provincial museum in Victoria I hate to say!)

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The exhibit includes a great variety of fossil and recent animal and plant specimens, including a couple of dinosaur specimens discovered by the famous Elmer Riggs. Here are some real vertebrae from Brachiosaurus. These were used as the basis for the mount outside the museum.

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They also had a partial juvenile Gorgosaurus he discovered on display, nicknamed "Elmer".

Field Museum Instagram photo of Elmer.

 

But there was a real treasure ahead for lovers of Mazon Creek fossils...

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At the end of the first hall was a massive painting of a Tully Monster, rendered using the latest scientific interpretation. And in the display case below were dozens of Tullies! The entire right half of the case is filled with them.

 

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They also had a great little life-size model of the Tully on display too.

 

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Look at those, its enough to make you drool. And there was more, the left half of the case was filled with a variety of other plant and animal material from Mazon deposits, including a large insect wing, a Bandringa shark, a millipede, and many more.

 

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There was also a display honoring the contributions of Jack Wittry, volunteer at the museum and author of the ESCONI Mazon Creek guidebooks, as well as member of the forums here as @fiddlehead. This display also had some actual Mazon fossils you could touch.

 

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My description here is only the tip of the iceberg, there was a ton more to see just in this exhibit. 

 

I did also make my way up to the regular exhibit devoted to the fossil history of earth, Evolving Planet, where I found a small but excellent display of Mazon Creek fossils. This one even included a rare Curculioides arachnid similar to one I found here in central Illinois, as well as more millipedes and other arthropods from the Braidwood fauna. There were also some excellent samples of Mazon flora as well.

 

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Although the majority of the Mazon Creek material was in the "coal swamp" display, there were a few significant specimens elsewhere, including some great fish in the evolution of fish section and this stunning Pseudophlegethontia turnbullorum amphibian on display in the Hall of Dinosaurs for some reason...

 

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My only disappointment was that the Essex biota of the Mazon Creek deposit got relatively short shrift, with only a Tully Monster and a few jellyfish and shrimp on display in the regular exhibit. To be fair, though, squirmy worms and blobby jellyfish are not nearly as eye-carching to the casual viewer as fossil ferns and fish are. 

 

All told it was a wonderful day, revisiting an old haunt with a fresh eye and discovering many fantastic fossils I had missed before, as well as the excellent new special exhibit, and all in the company of other devoted science lovers.

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45 minutes ago, Wrangellian said:

Well at least I can say I like the architecture, suitable for any sort of temple (and better than our provincial museum in Victoria I hate to say!)

 

It's definitely a gorgeous building, and the view of Lake Michigan and the city can't be beat!

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Sure... The one in Victoria is in a nice location too, but the architecture, ummm...

 

Those Mazon displays would have me drooling too, Thanks for showing.

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nice report

CFM1.JPG

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"_ Carl Sagen

No trees were killed in this posting......however, many innocent electrons were diverted from where they originally intended to go.

" I think, therefore I collect fossils." _ Me

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."__S. Holmes

"can't we all just get along?" Jack Nicholson from Mars Attacks

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7 hours ago, deutscheben said:

It's definitely a gorgeous building

 

Wish I could have been there last weekend. This too was one of my old haunts. When I was a kid, every Sunday I'd hop on a CTA bus with my grandfather and after a few transfers we'd find ourselves down at the museum complex. We'd rotate between the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, The Field Museum or a bit further south the Museum of Science and Industry. It's no wonder that I have science encoded in my DNA instead of sports (obvious to anyone who ever saw me throw a ball :P).

 

The Field Museum was built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and funded by Marshall Field, founder of the somewhat recently defunct Marshal Field & Company store that lasted just over a sesquicentennial. I believe the Field and the Museum of Science and Industry are the only two buildings left from the Exposition.

 

When I was a kid I was there so often that I had virtually all of the exhibits memorized. If something changed I tended to know about it probably before most of the museum docents. Of course, most kids (at least the ones I knew) went through a dinosaur "phase" when they were young. Imagine having a world-class museum available to fire the imagination. I knew I was "home" when I stepped through the front door into the main hall and saw the enormous taxidermied Fighting African Elephants exhibit and the tall Brachiosaurus mount. Sadly, the Brachiosaurus lost its space due to a more well publicized "Sue" which did, however, have the intended effect of bringing more people into the museum.

 

A number of years ago I was working with some researchers who were doing work on relating the reflectance or absorption of light due to a coral's skeletal structure to its sensitivity to bleaching (there turns out to be a significant relationship). They were gathering coral bleaching data by species (which was part of my contribution to the final paper) and using small samples of coral skeletons to measure the overall reflectance. They were making use of the museum's vast collection of corals from all over the world that are housed in the maze of storage areas that you can easily imagine fill all available space that is not reserved for offices in the behind-the-scenes portion of the museum. Kinda fun to be able to walk through the doors from the public area into the real working part of the museum. One of the researchers was also doing DNA work on corals and their symbiotic algae (important knowledge when working on coral bleaching). I mentioned my fascination with genomic sequencing and they arranged for me to return a couple times that week to watch the process of all the steps involved in sequencing some DNA (using a number of Pacific damselfish samples). Based on the success of the McDonald's sponsored Sue prep lab that allowed the public to see fossil preparation up close (yet behind glass) they opened a DNA Discovery Center and I was fortunate enough to spend some time behind the glass doing the DNA extraction, amplification, fragmenting, sequencing. Since I come from a computer science background, the part I enjoyed the most was the software that reassembled the smaller sequences of decoded DNA back into the original sequence.

 

Ah, science and logical deductive reasoning....sure are going to miss those. :(

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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