Field Museum

Push through the doors, and the hall opens like a canyon. White marble columns rise four stories on either side. Daylight falls from the ceiling onto the floor far below. And stretched across that floor stands a dinosaur longer than three school buses, its neck reaching toward the balcony.

Welcome to the Field Museum of Natural History, one of the largest museums of its kind in the world. Its collection holds about 40 million objects. Fossils, meteorites, mummies, gemstones, and drawer after drawer of birds, beetles, and pressed plants. Only a small fraction is ever on display. The rest supports scientists who still describe new species from these shelves every year.

The museum began with a fair. In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, a giant showcase of art, industry, and science. When the fair closed, its natural history collections needed a home. A new museum opened in 1894 to keep them. Marshall Field, the department store owner, gave one million dollars to make it possible, and in 1905 the museum took his name.

The building you are standing in came later. The museum moved here in 1921, into this white marble temple built in the classical style of the fair. It anchors the Museum Campus, a green peninsula it shares with the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, with the lake on three sides and the skyline behind.

The giant in the main hall is Máximo, a cast of Patagotitan mayorum, one of the largest animals ever to walk on land. The original bones were dug from a ranch in Argentina. From nose to tail, Máximo measures 122 feet. Stand beneath the neck and look up. The head hovers higher than the second-floor balcony.

Look up as you cross the hall. Casts of giant pterosaurs, flying reptiles with wings like sails, hang in the air overhead, and planters of greenery spill from the balconies. The hall was redesigned in 2018, when Máximo arrived to take the center of the floor and the museum's most famous resident moved upstairs.

That resident is Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found, about 90 percent of the animal. A fossil hunter named Sue Hendrickson spotted the bones in 1990, weathering out of a cliff in South Dakota. In 1997 the skeleton went to auction, and the museum won it for 8.36 million dollars, then a record price for a fossil.

Sue now fills a darkened suite inside the Evolving Planet galleries. The skeleton runs more than 40 feet, with hips 13 feet above the floor. Look closely at the head. The skull on the mount is a cast, because the real one weighs around 600 pounds, too heavy to hang safely. The true skull rests in its own case nearby, close enough to study every tooth.

Downstairs, two lions crouch behind glass. In 1898, this pair of male lions stalked the camps of workers building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. They killed dozens of people over nine months before a British colonel shot them. How many died is still debated. The museum's own researchers put the count near 35. The lions were sold to the museum in the 1920s, and scientists still study them today.

In the Egyptian galleries, you can walk into a real tomb. The exhibit rebuilds a mastaba, an ancient burial structure, around carved chamber rooms from the tomb of Unis-Ankh, the son of a pharaoh who lived more than four thousand years ago. Beyond it lie mummies, painted coffins, and everyday objects from along the Nile.

There is far more than can fit in one visit. The Grainger Hall of Gems glitters with emeralds and opals. The Evolving Planet galleries walk you through four billion years of life. Halls of birds and mammals preserve dioramas made by hand a century ago, each one a small frozen world.

A practical word. The museum is enormous, and tired feet end more visits than closing time does. Pick two or three sections and take them slowly. School groups arrive mid-morning on weekdays, so the quietest hours are right at opening and late in the afternoon.

Before you go, stand once more in the great hall and think about the drawers upstairs. Forty million specimens, each one collected, labeled, and kept. Every bird and beetle was once alive somewhere on this planet. Gathered here, they form a library of life on Earth, written one specimen at a time, still growing, still being read.