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The Top 3 Exhibits at Chicago’s Field Museum

Published on 2009/03/31 in Photography Stories and Travel. 8 Comments Tags: Chicago, museum.

Rarely am I able to step into a place with such vast wealth of knowledge as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois; and I do not use the word “vast” lightly. First opened in 1893, the Field Museum is a world-class natural history museum enclosing over 1 million square feet with more than 20 million specimens, including Sue, the largest, most complete, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever discovered. Today I’m going to talk a bit about my experience at the Field Museum and point out what I consider the top 3 exhibits you simply can’t miss.

Fossils in the Floor

Interestingly enough, a curator that I met on the first floor told me that most of the building isn’t even accessible to the public. Two floors were above the publicly-accessible 2nd floor, and two floors were beneath the pulicly-accessible lower floor, making six total. With a sense of mystery, he told me about the different levels and how the floor I was standing on actually contained pieces of ancient fossils from a sea bed. I looked down and photographed these small white fragments embedded in the tiles. He also explained some of the history of the building and how it was used as a hospital in one of the nation’s larger wars. I wasn’t sure if I could believe him entirely, but this older-looking gentleman did work for the museum, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

#1. Meet Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex

Without a doubt, the first thing you’ll notice when you step into the Field Museum is the looming T-rex on the first floor. And this magnificent T-rex is definitely in my list of top 3 exhibits to enjoy while at the museum. The T-rex, nicknamed Sue, is nearly 13 meters long (42 feet), 4 meters (13 feet) tall at the hip, and the most complete T-rex ever discovered. It was simultaneously wonderful and frightening to imagine that this 7 ton creature once roamed the Earth hunting its prey.

I decided to wait a bit for the 11:15 tour, and it was definitely worth the short wait. The tour guide introduced the main areas of the museum: Paleontology, Geology, Biology, and Egyptology, among other things. When this brief introduction finished, we were near the Egyptian exhibit on the first floor which was a small stone building. The huge stones looked as if they really were from Egypt, and inside this small stone building I met the same curator I’d met before the tour began. He talked at length about what the hieroglyphics on the walls meant and briefly discussed Egyptian pharaohs and their ways of life. He departed as quickly as he appeared (such as many fascinating people are apt to do), and I began exploring the maze of a museum on my own.

#2. Step inside the Ancient Egypt exhibit

The Ancient Egyptian exhibit is wonderfully diverse, and it’s my second pick for my list of top 3 exhibits you can’t miss at the Field Museum. Within the Egyptian stone building, I found a staircase going up over a stone wall and then down again. (It was one of the few staircases I’ve used in my life that went up first in order to take you to a lower level.) And soon I was descending down the flights into darkness.

At first, I couldn’t see much.

Once my eyes adjusted, I could see I was now sanding in a rather dark hallway with dramatic lighting around me. Actually I was in a replication of a Mastaba Tomb. I turned a corner and saw a mummy for the first time in a long while. The gilded mummy had gold-embossed face, and it was holding up pretty well considering its age of about 2,300 years.

As I neared the heart of the Ancient Egypt exhibit, I passed a wooden coffin with the Eye of Horus (also known as Ra) painted on its side. The Eye of Horus symbol was frequently painted on coffins to protect the occupant in the afterlife. Farther on, I was delighted to see Egyptian scrolls, memorial stones, and even a real Egyptian. Yes, the unwrapped mummy of a boy was carefully placed on a blanket behind some glass. A sign explained that the museum didn’t know when or why the boy’s wrappings were removed and pointed out that, before x-ray photography, mummies were often unwrapped to simply see what was inside.

While exploring, I also discovered other fascinating facts such as how to play a board game that the Pharaohs used to play and remains of an Egyptian sculpture that looked strikingly like Michael Jackson. Is this proof of Michael Jackson’s heritage or a mere coincidence? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Probably the most surprising element was the Egyptian love poem entitled “Last Night Made It Seven, My Eyes Missed My Kitten” which was delightfully frank about romantic love. Here’s an excerpt:

“Why, that girl’s better than any prescription,
more to me than the Pharmacopoeia –
My own secret Hathor Home Remedy?–
Her slipping into my room from the road!
(have her examine me, then watch my energy!)

See the entire poem in the gallery.

Seems little has changed in three thousand years when it comes to romance, including man’s propensity to write poetry for his beloved. How endearing.

A Short Underground Adventure

Soon after, I took a brief detour into the Underground Adventure exhibit in which everything is oversized and the visitor is plunged into a bug’s eye view of the underground world. If you like giant earwig models, giant spiders, or giant pennies that say, “In Soil We Trust,” you’ll really dig this place. The exhibit did a good job at showing how alive soil really is, but I would have appreciated more interactivity.

The Hall of Jades and Mysterious Bi discs

After snapping a picture of the Stanley Field sculpture, I headed up to the 2nd floor where fresh wonders awaited me. I began at the Hall of Jades which featured a 1,130 kg (2490 lb) Nephrite boulder, mysterious Bi discs from the Neolithic era, and a beautiful jadeite desk screen from the Chinese Qing period. A description below the Bi discs explained that the significance of these discs is still a mystery, apparently being used in burials stretching back as far as 4,000 years ago. What could their purpose be? Are they part of a memorial tradition? I can’t help but think of the discs from the movie Tron in which one’s entire life depended on a disc. The disc shape, it seems, has a long and detailed history in human culture.

Just outside the Hall of Jades were some Chinese artifacts. One was an exquisitely detailed ivory carving of the Daoist longevity god, and the other was a wood carving of Guan Yin. You remember Guan Yin, don’t you? It’s the Bodhisattva of compassion. Can’t recall, perhaps? About two years before, I came across the figure of Guan Yin in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Unlike that large statue, this figure of Guan Yin had 24 arms and was sitting on what appeared to be a pine cone. I’d read a bit about ancient pine cone symbology, but I didn’t expect it to show up in Buddhist art from 200 years ago. Of course, the world is full of surprises, and pine cone symbology shows up in the most surprising places. Recommended research.

T-rex Mural & Sue’s Skull Up Close

After briefly examining a trilobite fossil that had been into Earth orbit, I made my way over to the T-rex skull exhibit. Because of its weight, the real skull was on display up here on the 2nd level, separate from the rest of the skeleton. An accurate copy of the skull, one that weighed less, was made for the full T-rex skeleton I saw on the first floor. I enjoyed being able to see Sue’s skull up close, and I couldn’t help but wonder how it really looked all those years ago, when it was alive and warm breath came from its nostrils.

Above the skull was a huge mural of Sue painted by Paleoartist John Gurche. Later I learned that he won the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology for this mural, and I can see why. It’s fantastically textured and cleverly laid out, quite lifelike. The viewer is placed in a subordinate position, making the T-rex look huge and menacing with it’s eyes glowing a soft red and dead prey underfoot.

Nearby were displays highlighting Sue’s furcula (a.k.a. the wishbone), which was the first ever found from a T-rex. This is especially exciting to scientists because only birds and meat-eating dinosaurs have wishbones. The forelimb (a.k.a. what normal people would call the arm) was also on display. Since it’s so short, how the forelimb was used remains a mystery to this day.

#3. The Evolving Planet Exhibit

And even more mysteries lay ahead for me on that day for the next part of the museum I explored was a cornerstone of the entire museum, and it’s also my 3rd and final pick: The Evolving Planet exhibit. So far, I’d only seen a handful of ancient creatures, but as I soon learned, that was only the tip of the ice burg.

Take a trip back to the origins of life on Earth with me and visit the Evolving Planet Exhibit photo album in the Byteful Gallery. Warning: Blood-thirsty dinosaurs are contained therein. And perhaps even an Dromaeosaur claw… No!!! The horror! The horror! The horror…

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Photos from this trip are in the Field Museum – Chicago and Evolving Planet Exhibit albums. All photos in the Byteful Gallery can be used as desktop wallpapers because they are high resolution (1920×1440) just like the fullscreen & widescreen wallpapers.

Recommended Reading:

Adler Planetarium: Cutting-Edge meets Classic

Published on 2009/02/18 in Photography Stories and Travel. 2 Comments Tags: Chicago.

Adler Planetarium!
Space-type place.
People smile here.

It is basically a crime to visit Chicago without spending some time in Chicago’s Museum Campus. Not only is it home to the wonderful Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum, it is also the home of the world famous Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, the oldest planetarium still in existence today. But don’t let that fool you: the Adler Planetarium employs some of the latest state-of-the-art equipment, as well as tons of interactive exhibits that somehow manage to entertain, educate, and hold the attention of both children and adults.

The building itself is impressive, having a huge domed top — for the planetarium part, of course. But that was still to come. You actually enter into the upper floor and can go down from there. The upper floor had some interesting sights, such as a life-like model of NASA’s Mars Rover “Spirit” and a scale model of the solar system featuring a sun that extended beyond the height of the floor.

On the upper floor there were plenty of interactive exhibits such as:

Dials you could turn to control a boiling geyser simulator, the effect of which was otherworldly and fascinating.
A crater-making machine which shot clay meteors onto a clay surface to simulate what a real crater would look like.
Funhouse-type mirrors that showed what might happen to you if you were pulled into a black hole feet first. Apparently the technical term that astronomers use is “spaghettification.” (See the photos.)
An overhead infrared light aimed at a large round mirror showed how even non-visible light can be reflected. You could definitely feel the heat if you were at the correct angle from the mirror.
A rather absurd but amusing light sculpture that looked like it was from some 1980s interior design movement, though it was actually meant to give the viewer an idea of how many stars can be seen in the night sky.
And an obligatory solar-powered car that every museum seems to have these days.

The creators of the museum really made an effort to make the museum as educational and interactive as possible to people of all ages.

Down on the Lower Level

On the lower level, which was quite dark, there was a small theater, which I would see later, and a simulated NASA classroom. Videos of moon landings and space walks were playing on large screens, and beyond that an infrared image of the hallway appeared on a huge screen. I was lucky because just as I approached the large screen, a family of three approached, and their infrared image appeared on the screen. Not sure how much it had to do with astronomy, but it certainly looked interesting! (Hint: Yellow is warmer.)

Cutting-edge Atwood Sphere

Probably the most popular attraction on the lower level was the Atwood Sphere: a huge, yet thin, metal sphere with tiny holes in its surface to create a whopping 692 stars. It was designed to show people the alignments of the stars before humans had ever invented any of the fancy planetarium projectors we use today. At the time it was completed in 1913, it was hailed as “…the most advanced teaching model available and the only walk-in planetarium in North America.” As much as I would have liked to step inside and capture the experience for all of you, there was a line in front of it longer than Falkor, and the planetarium show would be starting soon.

Dearborn Telescope is Ginormous

However, I did have time to see the immense Dearborn Telescope. When I say immense, I mean that you can’t help but gasp when you see it in person, and I could scarcely fit it into my camera’s field of view. Created in 1864, its 18.5 inch lens was a monster in size. A plaque below said that it was originally created for an observatory at the University of Mississippi, but that the Civil War prevented its delivery. So the Chicago Astronomical Society bought it and created the Dearborn telescope. (More information is available in the description of the picture of Dearborn telescope in the gallery.)

Sky Theater Planetarium

Soon, the planetarium show would finally begin. With my camera slung around my neck, I walked into a large dark room, a huge domed ceiling spanning over me, and sat down on one of the hundreds of plastic chairs arranged around a large center column in the center of the room. Atop the column stood a curious device, almost reminiscent of a telescope, except that the end was rounded and had many lenses on its surface. This was the Zeiss Planetarium projector, of course.

Projection of a movie onto the Planetarium dome

The planetarium show was very enjoyable. We got to see a brief history of the historical origins of the constellations, which constellations were visible from Chicago at certain times of the year, and some tips on how to find them ourselves. As you can see from the photos, the projector is also capable of projecting movies onto the domed ceiling, and one of the movies we saw suggested that the galaxies of the universe, when viewed from the right perspective, were arranged in a predictable, almost fractal, pattern. Of course, it’s only a preliminary observation, but if it’s true it would raise some very profound questions about the nature of the universe…

Quickly Shoot for the Moon

When the show ended, I had about 15 minutes before the show in the other theater would start. In that interim, I had just enough time to examine the Gemini XII spacecraft in Adler’s “Shoot for the Moon” exhibit. After looking at the controls, I gained even more respect for the men and women who learn to pilot these incredible machines. In fact, I was surprised that this ancient hunk of metal even made it into orbit. But to be fair, I was looking at quite an old bird that had flown over 40 years ago, and Gemini had aged a lot since then.

Definiti Theater: Cosmic Collisions

The second show took place on the lower level in the Definiti Theater, a digital video environment that utilized a special domed ceiling. This theater was part of an expansion to Adler Planetarium that happened in 1999. That day, a film about planetary collisions, creatively named Cosmic Collisions, was playing in the Definiti Theater; and, despite its name, the film had some rather poignant and graceful moments. It featured some incredible planetary simulations and postulations about how the moon was created. Aside from being entertaining, it was also an educational film, explaining how the Earth’s magnetic field works among other things, and I think most people in the audience walked away having learned something.

Outdoor Attractions

Soon after the Definiti Theater show had finished, the museum closed, but outside of the planetarium were some interesting features, as well. An elegant sculpture entitled “Man Enters the Cosmos” was a reasonably accurate sundial, and a plaque below even explained how to adjust the sundial’s reading to get a more accurate time, depending on the season.

What was more fascinating, though, was Americas’ Courtyard stone calendar. The calendar, built only of short stones that one could sit on, worked on the same principle as the Stonehenge of England, having gaps aligning with where the sun rises and sets at the June and December solstices. The stones were even arranged in a spiral pattern to embody the spiral shape of the galaxies, and I remembered that I’d photographed a plaque inside the museum that mentioned visitors may check the progression of the seasons by seeing where the Sun rises or sets between the two solstice gaps in the stones.

Americas' Courtyard Stone Calendar & Lake Michigan in the background

As I photographed the stone calendar, an Asian couple sat on some of the stones, probably deciding how they would spend the rest of their day in Chicago; and in the distance, tiny white sailboats navigated the calm lake. In that moment, as the shadows from the stones grew longer, the afternoon light was rather beautiful.

It’s Out of this World

Whether you have children or not, the Adler Planetarium is not to be missed. Beyond being the only museum in the world with two full-size planetarium theaters and being the oldest planetarium still existing today, the Adler Planetarium has continued to adapt to the changing times and remains an excellent place to explore the wonders of the galaxy around us — the perfect balance between classic and cutting-edge. If you’re taking a trip to visit Chicago, please stop by the Museum Campus. Once you see the dome for yourself, you may just be drawn to go inside and make your own discoveries.

See you, space cowboy.

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Photos from this trip are in the Adler Planetarium – Chicago album. All photos in the Byteful Gallery can be used as desktop wallpapers because they are high resolution (1920×1440) just like the fullscreen & widescreen wallpapers.