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Published: March 9th 2012
Sue the T. Rex
Sue, the most famous and faught over dinosaur in the world.I spent the day in another of Chicago’s major museums, the
Field Museum of Natural History.
It is named for department store founder Marshall Field (see
The Birth of The Modern City), who provided a large donation to build the building.
The museum is one of the finest of its type.
It focuses on four things,
geology,
animals,
plants, and
anthropology.
Given my tastes, I focused on the first two.
A word of warning: this is not a place for those who hate kids, because it attracts them with more power than an ice cream truck.
The first notable thing one sees is the
building, a Beaux Arts classic from 1912 with a huge central hall flanked by wings on either side.
The hall is made of marble.
The upper levels have statues representing scientific inquiry (look for the one of a scientist holding a magnifying glass).
This museum looks the way people expect Victorian science museums to look.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, Sue
The centerpiece of the museum collection, located in the middle of the great hall, is the tyrannosaurus rex skeleton
Sue.
This dinosaur is the most complete fossil of its type ever
discovered, with only three bones missing.
Even delicate bones in the skull that never survive were found with this one.
The museum presents the dinosaur as a masterpiece of science, but it also inadvertently shows as a masterpiece of greed and promotion.
Knowing the
back story helps.
Sue was found in the Badlands of South Dakota by a paleontologist named Sue Hendrickson in 1990.
She worked for the
Black Hills Institute, a local company that specializes in dinosaur fossils.
By law, the dinosaur belonged to them because they paid the landowner for permission to dig.
Once people realized just how rare, and valuable, the fossil was, a convoluted series of lawsuits followed.
They centered on disputed land claims and whether the Institute really had permission to dig where they did.
These culminated with a raid on the Institute’s offices by the FBI!
In the end the dinosaur was auctioned to the highest bidder.
The Field Museum won with a bid of over eight million dollars; the Black Hills Institute got very little of the proceeds.
The only mention of all this at the dinosaur is a tiny plaque
thanking the McDonalds Corporation for a gift; they donated the cash needed to win the auction.
Upstairs also has a video on the dinosaur’s public unveiling ten years ago, which clearly shows the museum knows the
promotion value of its prize full well.
Fossils
Sue may be a science carnival show, but the other fossil exhibit is much better.
The museum calls it
Evolving Planet.
It contains a vast array of fossils of all kinds, arranged chronologically.
The plaques near the fossils describe what the creatures are, when they lived, and why they are important.
A fossilized seed doesn’t look like much until one realizes it is from the first flowering plant in existence.
The display also has a number of dioramas that try to recreate Earth at various times in its history, and a series of paintings of different environments commissioned in the 1920s.
First in line are single cell organisms, such as algae, during the Precambrian Period.
They are the oldest life form on earth, and the museum has
fossils.
One can’t overemphasize the importance of the evolution of
photosynthesis during this era.
Next up
Fosillized Algae
Fosills of some of the oldest life on Earth. Without them, the oxygen we need would not exist! are simple sea creatures, dominated by trilobites, during the Cambrian Period.
A mass extinction killed seventy percent of them.
In the next stage, creatures moved onto land, and evolved to live there full time.
Insects and ferns, the oldest land creatures, evolved in this stage, the Carboniferous Period.
The next stage, the Permian Period, saw the emergence of amphibians and reptiles.
It ended with the most devastating mass extinction in history, which killed ninety percent of all life!
The next stage, the Triassic, saw the evolution of two important animals, dinosaurs and mammals.
The first mammals were small mouse-like creatures.
The museum has a list of what
characteristics make them mammals, and how those same characteristics appear in us.
That section leads into the exhibit centerpiece:
Dinosaur Hall.
It is filled with dinosaur skeletons of all kinds, from the
huge animal once called a Brontosaurus to the deadly
Velociraptor.
Pterodactyl, the ancestor of modern birds, makes an appearance with a display listing what links modern birds to their ancestor.
It also discusses the mass extinction that wiped them all out, which many scientists now
Dinosauur Hall
A tiny portion of Dinosaur Hall (hold on to the kids!) believe was caused by a huge asteroid impact.
Kids never want to leave.
The next part of this exhibit discusses the Tertiary Period, and the
evolution of human beings.
This being a science museum, there is no mention of alternative explanations. 😊
The museum owns a cast copy of Lucy, one of the most complete skeletons of a human ancestor ever discovered.
The hominid family tree is really complicated, with lots of different branches that died out.
The most famous were the Neanderthals, which people once believed were a human ancestor.
One section has a list of things that in modern humans seem useless (
wisdom teeth!) but helped our ancestors survive.
The display also compares brain size through the ages, and shows that the modern human brain evolved incredibly recently.
Prepare for a gut punch at the last part.
The final section covers the last, and ongoing, mass extinction.
It has claimed over a million species and counting.
The display has an ever rising counter that estimates the number.
The cause of this extinction is humans.
Underground Adventure
Underground Adventure has a
Human Evolution
Part of the exhibit showing the evolution of humans very different feel to anything else in the museum.
This area is a science exhibit as imagined by people from Walt Disney World.
The theme is that visitors get shrunk one hundred times smaller than normal and injected into the topsoil outside the museum to learn more about it.
It sounds hokey but works incredibly well.
The corridors are made of huge plastic dirt particles.
Huge, and accurate, models of roots drop all over the place.
Periodically, animatronics animals make an appearance, such as an earthworm burrowing through the soil and a scary crayfish.
The science part of this exhibit discusses the
nutrient cycle of soil.
Top soil is rich due to decay.
Dead plants and animals are decomposed by tiny bacteria which release nutrients.
Plants and animals feed on the nutrients, and other things feed on them.
Everything in the system is connected.
Water is crucial, because nothing could live without it.
Top soil is loose enough that rain water flows between the particles.
Don’t miss the part where this is demonstrated!
The overarching message is that soil
Undergound Adventure
Welcome to soil from a bug's perspective. A lot of things are happening down here. is a living thing, and people need to
care for it properly.
The exhibit does not demonstrate the effects of pollution, but it should be obvious enough.
I really enjoyed this part of the museum, and found it better than anything science related that Epcot (in Walt Disney World) has to offer.
I wish other museums would try something like this.
Minerals and Gems
The last area I looked at is the museum’s
mineral and gem collection.
The display calls it the most extensive in the Midwest, although it can’t compare to some I’ve seen.
The centerpiece is a room holding a selection of gems used for jewelry, including diamonds, rubies, and opals.
Every gem is represented three ways: as raw ore, uncut gem, and final product.
A huge amount of each gem is removed during the cutting process.
Unlike other museums I’ve been to, this one does not discuss the design process of the final gem.
An extensive array of more common minerals surrounds this room.
Each one is identified by chemical composition and a discussion of what it is used for.
Some of them are very beautiful.
The collection
Diamonds, from the gem exhibit
The journey of a diamond, from the gems exhibit. The left is raw ore, the middle is a diamond before cutting, the right is the final gems. closes with a set of
meteorites, including a
famous one from 1938 which fell through a garage in Illinois and totaled a car.
Three of the meteorites are from Mars.
The Field Museum used to be located next to a building that was yet another architectural landmark,
Soldier Field, long time home to the Bears (see
The Glory of the Game).
The original stadium was designed by Holabird and Roche in 1925, the same architects who designed the Marquette Building, as a memorial to soldiers who died in combat.
It was a neoclassical bowl modeled on a Roman coliseum, with a famous row of stately columns on either side.
The stadium became such an architectural icon that one TV network used it in its opening montage for NFL broadcasts.
Unfortunately, Soldier Field lacked things that modern NFL teams consider essential, such as huge concession areas, comfortable seats, and (most importantly) tier after tier of really expensive luxury suites.
The team, with support from the city, built a new stadium on top of the existing one in 2005.
I’ve seen the inside during Bears broadcasts, and it looks even worse from the
The Benld meteorite
This rock from outer space crashed into a garage in Illinois in 1938, totaling a car. outside.
I can best describe it as a huge ugly metal spaceship.
The stadium is so awful, the National Trust for Historic Preservation took the rare step of removing the original stadium underneath it from their register.
Whoever signed off on this, they ended up replacing a historically significant structure with one of the ugliest buildings in Chicago.
I had dinner tonight at Marshall Field’s (which is really a Macy’s currently).
Among many other things, the store has a full food court.
The most notable thing about the meal was dessert.
Marshall Field’s was famed for its
Frango mints, a truffle made from two types of chocolate and peppermint.
They ultimately expanded them into a wide line of chocolate snacks, everything from simple milk chocolate bars to chocolate covered s’mores.
Macy’s, thankfully, has continued this tradition and the store has an entire
Frango department.
The truffles are very good, and addictive.
I managed to stop after eight 😊
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