Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

Exhibits of the Field Museum of Natural History

• Neolithic Chinese Painted Pottery
  • This Neolithic Chinese Painted Pottery was found in the graves of New Stone Age people who lived in northwest China over 3,500 years ago. The fine shapes, smoothed surfaces, red, and black painting are typical of the Pan-Shan Pottery. The Pan-Shan culture (2500 – 2000BC) of Neolithic China had this distinctively painted pottery. Pottery is one of the oldest human inventions, originating before the Neolithic period, with ceramic objects like the pottery vessels that were discovered in China, which date back to 18,000 BC.

• Sue – Tyrannosaurus Rex Dinosaur
  • Sue is the largest, most extensive and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimen ever found, at over 90% original. It was discovered in 1990 by Sue Hendrickson, an explorer and fossil collector, and was named after her. This fossil was auctioned in 1997, for US$ 8.3 million, the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil, and is now a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.

• Maori Meeting House, Ruatepupuke II
  • The Maori Meeting House, Ruatepupuke II, was built by the New Zeland Maori community at Tokomaru Bay in 1881. They named it Ruatepupuke II after their renowned ancestor, who, according to legend, brought the art of carving to the world. The large mask carved and placed on the gable roof summit represents Ruatepupuke. Ruatepupuke is said to have established the tradition of carved meeting houses on the East Coast of New Zealand. Māori Meeting Houses are often named after ancestors and considered to embody that person. The house is seen as an outstretched body and can be addressed like a living being.

• Prehistoric Stone Hand Axe
  • Stone tool societies and cultures made these prehistoric Stone Hand Axes during the Stone Age. Archaeologists study stone tools to understand the cultural implications of tool use and manufacture. Stone has been used to make a variety of different tools and weapons throughout history, including arrowheads, spear points, hand axes, and querns to grind cereals into flour. Hand axes were the first tools to be recognized as prehistoric. The first published representation of a hand axe was drawn for a British publication in 1800. Until that time, their origins were thought to be supernatural. They were called thunderstones because tradition held that they had fallen from the sky during storms or were formed inside the earth by a lightning strike and then appeared at the surface. They were used in some rural areas as an amulet to protect against storms.

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Natural History Quotes

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“The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography.”
– Marston Bates

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“But in science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.”
– Francis Darwin

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“Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.”
– Marston Bates

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“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
– Immanuel Kant

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“Go to the source for ideas, go to the Metropolitan Museum, find your inspiration in nature, go to the Museum of Natural History, but never rely on something that someone else has done.”
– Van Day Truex

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“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”
– Claude Lévi-Strauss

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“A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory.”
– Louis Agassiz

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“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
– Isaac Newton

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“In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvelous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.”
– Alfred Russel Wallace

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Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in the time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.”
– Blaise Pascal

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“Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”
– Richard Powers

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“It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.”
– Alfred Russel Wallace

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“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end, the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.”
– Bertrand Russell

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“Birds, it must be admitted, are the most exciting and most deserving of the vertebrates; they are perhaps the best entre into the study of natural history, and a very good wedge into conservation awareness.”
– Roger Tory Peterson

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“When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions; that is the heart of science.”
– Carl Sagan

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“Another thing about [Field Museum of Natural History] which inspired was that in a group of pots you wouldn’t see a single example of this kind of pot. You would perhaps see a case with 20 different examples. So you realize that these pots could be repeated again and again, and each time there would be minor variations in them.”
– Warren MacKenzie

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“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…”
– Isaac Asimov

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“Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for the surreptitious burial of those intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist.”
– David Lack

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“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
– William Lawrence Bragg

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“I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
– John Adams

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