Sue Had It Coming

One of the other major museums in Chicago is the Field Museum, located on Museum Campus along with the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field. From Millennium Park, we walked along the waterfront to the Field Museum, entered the museum, and came face to face with Máximo. Máximo is a titanosaur who has taken Sue’s place. Sue the t-rex is currently in storage while a new home gets built for her. We also arrived while a pterosaur was in the process of being hung, which was newsworthy enough for at least one news station to send a cameraman.

Stanley Field Hall, the main lobby of the Field Museum.

Pterosaur to the left, Máximo to the right.

While the Museum of Science and Industry features exhibits containing things people have made, like boats and trains, the Field Museum skews more towards natural history, like rocks and taxidermy. The first exhibit we visited had you imagine that you shrink to a hundredth of your size and explore an underground den of dirt, roots, and insects. We’re going to ignore the scientific implications (hi, Ant-Man) because it’s a cool idea. The exhibit teaches about soil porosity, types of root systems, symbiotic root fungus, and the kinds of insects you might meet.

Just a friendly neighborhood grub.

Next, we walked through an exhibit about conservation, which showed video clips and field notes from an actual Field Museum trip to Peru for rainforest conservation. That led to the Regenstein Halls of the Pacific, featuring objects from and information about various Pacific island nations. From there, we emerged back on the upper level balcony, looked at some of the rocks and meteorites, and then it was time for lunch. Downstairs in the Explorer Café, I uncomplainingly ate yet more museum food before wandering the Field Museum for three and a half more hours.

We returned upstairs to see the gems and jade jewelry. That was followed by an entire hall of plants. We saw maybe three other people in this vast room of pine cones and palm fronds encased in glass. At least some of the seeds were real, but most of the leaves were not. Going through this fake forestry caused us to emerge straight in the dinosaur hall in the middle of the Evolving Planet exhibit. We spent some time visiting with Sue’s friends, then walked backwards through time, watching multicellular land animals devolve into sea blobs and trilobites.

One of Sue's friends, a hadrosaur

Back on the lower level, we covered birds, the cat and dog families, Asian mammals, African mammals, and What is an Animal?. That was the west side of the lower level. The east side contained an extensive exhibit about ancient American civilizations (Mayan, Incan, plus half a dozen others you never knew existed), items from Northwest Coast and Arctic Peoples, and the gift shop. Like the Museum of Science and Industry, you could spend an entire day here and still not see everything. I think we missed a few rooms because of how the exhibits lead into one another, but we saw almost everything in six hours, with a lunch break. I did mention that I like museums, right?

[The post title is a play on the song “She Had it Coming” from (wait for it) the musical Chicago. I wanted to name all the posts about this trip after song titles or lyrics from Chicago, but try as I might, I couldn’t relate a musical satirizing criminal justice to penguins, a U-Boat, or donuts (still to come).]