WBEZ | Field Museum

Field Museum offering early retirement to some curators

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:29:00 -0500

The Chicago Field Museum is offering early retirement packages for some of its employees. The museum, best known for its research and Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is shouldering a heavy debt burden and has been trying to find ways to cut back.

Field Museum spokeswoman Nancy O'Shea says the museum is offering retirement packages to more than half of its 27 curators. The 16 eligible employees were selected based on age and the length of their employment with the Field. They have until May 10 of this year to decide if they'll take the offer or not.

The museum announced in December that it was looking for ways to cut $5 million in costs, and boost endowment by $100 million. O'Shea says they've already identified ways to trim $2 million from their science initatives without cutting staff, but they're still looking for another million in cuts. This is the third time in the last five years that retirement incentive offers have been made to Field employees.

The museum has said in the past they were also considering admission rate hikes as a possible revenue booster, but O'Shea said she has nothing to announce on that topic.

Real life Django: Love’s struggles on the Underground Railroad

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0600

There’s a lot about Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated film Django Unchained that seems, true to the director’s well-known dramatic tendencies, somewhat larger than life: The huge personas of do-gooder bounty hunter King Schultz and sadistic slave owner Calvin Candie, for example, or the caricaturist’s rendering of the conniving head house slave, Stephen.

But one crucial element of the film’s plot does seem to be drawn from real life: Django’s struggle to reunite with his wife, Broomhilda, echoes the lengths slaves would really go to in order to stay with or be reunited with their loved ones.

Author Betty DeRamus uncovered countless stories of slavery-era couples struggling to be together in the face of incredible adversity while researching her book, Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad. “Some of them are black couples, some of them are a free black person with a slave mate, and a few of them are interracial couples,” DeRamus said. “But they all have one thing in common: All went to extraordinary lengths to avoid being separated.”

There was Joseph Antoine, for example, a free black man from Cuba who chose of life of indentured servitude in order to stay with his wife. “In the process of working on that [story],” DeRamus said, “I discovered there were quite a few black Virginians who were willing to surrender freedom because they said the price of freedom was too high; if it meant leaving their families, they’d rather not have it. And I had never heard that before.”

Then there was Isaac Berry, the Missouri slave in love with his white neighbor’s daughter, Lucy. Berry’s owner wanted to sell him to pay off gambling debts, but Berry escaped across the Mississippi River into Illinois, then traveled to Indiana, Michigan, and finally across the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada. Lucy, meanwhile, took the money her family had saved for boarding school and instead bought a train ticket to Detroit, and waited there to meet her beau.

“Remember, there were no cell phones, no Internet, no mass communication of any kind,” DeRamus said of this incident, pointing out the extreme difficulty of setting up such a daring and far off rendezvous. “One of the most extraordinary things about these couples is the faith that they had. . . that somehow things were going to work out.”

Perhaps the most remarkable story in DeRamus’ collection is that of John Little, a slave who carried his unconscious wife to freedom on his whip-scarred back. You can hear DeRamus read her account of John Little and his wife in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Betty DeRamus spoke at an event presented by The Field Museum in February of 2006. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Follow Robin Amer on Twitter @rsamer.

Cuts at the Field Museum could 'diminish' its international reputation

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:41:00 -0600

Updated: 5 p.m.

Chicago’s Field Museum is proposing a significant reduction in its re-operating budget, citing a hefty debt load. That could mean higher prices for patrons.

The museum hopes to reduce costs by $5 million and organize its scientific research wing, from academic departments like anthropology and zoology to more generic fields of study such as "museum exhibitions."

Field President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Lariviere said the museum is feeling the effects of the recession just like any other business or institution. He said administrators will talk with scientists and curators about how to balance the budget.

"The Field Museum is in really reasonably good shape," he said. "What we're trying to do is protect the future of this place by right-sizing ourselves at this moment to balance our budget, get things under control, so that we can ensure that the future includes the same kind of high quality, world-shaping research and discovery that it has in the past."

Lariviere said the museum's current structure is a "vestige" of university organization dating back to the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, the department of geology contains paleontologists, but no geologists.

"It's really not a rational structure," he said. "It certainly doesn't reflect the interdisciplinary nature and the creativity of the science that goes on here."

He said that makes it harder to explain to the public about the science and research going on behind the scenes.

More than 1 million people visit the museum every year, to see blockbuster shows and the Field's prized possession, a Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue. But the Field's global reputation comes from its cutting-edge scientific research and conservation effects.

"Behind the scenes, there is essentially a non-degree granting university that has scientists of all different stripes who travel around the world and make collections and study species and cultures and artifacts," said Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and the former provost of the Field.

Shubin says the budget cuts and proposed reorganization mean staff cuts. And those will diminish the museum’s reputation.

"Anytime you see a reorganization like this, it means large staff reductions. I see no way that they can continue the breadth of the research profile that has been one of their, you know, one of the legs of their eminence," Shubin said.

The Field says it will develop a new operating plan over the next six months.

An earlier version of this story referred to Sue as a "life-sized model" of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. But Sue's the real deal!

Field Museum cutting staff, overhauling operations

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:12:00 -0600

Chicago's renowned Field Museum, a major center of global scientific research, has announced plans to cut staff, overhaul operations and limit the scope of its research because of a high debt load and the recession.

The natural history museum might also change hours of operation and raise admission prices for special exhibits at one of the city's best-known cultural attractions, museum officials said Tuesday.

The Field Museum is known for its research into plants and animals and impressive collections, including Sue, the world's largest and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Field's cost-cutting measures will be an opportunity to refocus the mission of the museum, which was founded in 1893, officials said.

They hope to cut $5 million in costs and increase the museum's endowment by $100 million. Museum staff and board members will work on a plan between now and July 1.

The staff cuts will be aimed at curators and scientists. The museum will also focus more on its own collections and be more selective in choosing outside exhibits that cost more money to organize.

"If we wrestle these issues to the ground successfully, our future is rosy," the Field's president and CEO, Richard Lariviere, told the Chicago Tribune's editorial board.

Lariviere, the former University of Oregon president, started work at the museum in October.

Lariviere said the museum has more $170 million in outstanding bonds. He called that "very high" compared with the institution's $300 million endowment. The bonds cost the Field more than $7 million a year, taking a bite out of an operating budget of less than $70 million.

"Our credit cards are maxed out," Lariviere told the Tribune.

The Field Museum is one of Chicago's top tourist attractions, drawing 1.3 million visitors in 2011.

The cost-cutting plan follows earlier attempts to trim $5 million, also primarily through staff cuts. But rising bond debt and operating deficits over the past decade have combined with flat revenues and dwindling government subsidies to put a financial squeeze on the institution.

Despite the possible hike in ticket prices, Lariviere said the average patron shouldn't notice much of a change in the short term.

Bigger not necessarily better for Big Bird’s ancestors

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:34:00 -0600

For most of us, Big Bird is about as big as it gets when it comes to our feathered friends.

But for Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum, Big Bird is small stuff.

Makovicky is the Curator of Dinosaurs and Chair of the Department of Geology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. He’s spent the last few years researching giant bird-like dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, called theropods. You might know them from Jurassic Park or elementary school coloring books. T-Rex and the infamous velociraptor are both theropods. And in case you missed the memo, scientists now believe theropods had feathers. (Jurassic Park IV, anyone?)

A couple years ago Makovicky and Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University did a study showing that many theropods are actually vegetarians. So much for the cruel velociraptor stereotype.

The pair’s latest research focuses on the evolutionary patterns of those fearsome herbivores.

“The research that [we] did was to use dinosaurs to investigate the bigger evolutionary question of how animals become herbivorous,” said Makovicky. Scientists had hypothesized that as species’ evolved to become plant-eaters, their body mass would also grow.

Big vegetarians not ringing a bell? Step away from America’s next top vegetarian model and instead imagine an elephant, or a brachiosaurus, or a snuffaluffagus (not totally real, but still a relevant example). The broad theory about evolutionary mass and herbivory says that the bigger some herbivores get, the easier it is to take in all those leafy greens.

“It’s a lot harder to digest plants than meat,” Makovicky explained. “You have to intake the plants, and they have to sit in your gut for a long time and ferment for you to get as many calories out of them as from meat. For them to sit in a gut for a longer time, you essentially get a longer and larger gastrointestinal tract.”

Precisely.

But Makovicky’s and Zanno’s study, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows the vegetarians in the bunch did not consistently evolve to get bigger. Or, as the article title states, there is “No evidence for directional evolution of body mass in herbivorous theropod dinosaurs.”

To find out that such evidence didn’t exist, Makovicky and Zanno broke down the evolutionary trees of three different theropods who shifted to plant-based diets during the same time span, about 125 million to 65 million years ago. Evolutionary trees, or phlogenetic trees, are graphs that show the relationships scientists infer between evolving species over a period of time.

When Makovicky and Zanno analyzed the trees of their chosen theropods, they found that some of the bird-like giants got bigger, others smaller over different periods.

Chickens of the Cretaceous

The theropods Makovicky and Zanno studied were no slouches in the looks department. Makovicky called them “oddballs.”

“They don’t look anything like your traditional view of a dinosaur,” he said. The egg-thieves (oviraptorosaurs) are often depicted sitting on nests. They had a beak with a sliding jaw joint and a parrot-like head, sometimes with a bulge on top.

The scythe-lizards (therizinosaurs) were toothless, with a small head atop a long neck and squat body. Unlike the massive flamingos you might be picturing, though, they had thick limbs. And the ostrich-mimics (ornithomimosaurs) have a name that speaks for itself. Think of them as the giant chickens of the Cretaceous age.

All of these lizardly curios had feathers and are thought to be close relatives of current-day birds, and they lived in China, Mongolia, and what is now western North America.

Makovicky and Zanno conducted three tests based on the three theropod species, which they selected because all became herbivores during the Cretaceous period.

The first test showed that overall, the dinos in question got bigger over time. That was was scientists expected, a tendency that would be called “directional evolution of body mass.”

But when Zanno and Makovicky did a second test in which they broke down the evolutionary trees of each species and studied the branches of the trees, some of the branches got bigger while others got smaller at different times. That made it seem far less likely that any overall growth was consistently linked to the transition to herbivory.

In their third test, they focused on two theropod lineages that occurred over the same period and in a similar location. That allowed the researchers to observe that the changes in size over time track each other, meaning that when one of the species got smaller, so did the other. The logical conclusion from this observation was that some environmental factor experienced by both species was more important than diet in determining the evolutionary direction of their sizes.

Bigger is not always better. But why?

What would make a recent convert to vegetarianism benefit from shrinking?

Makovicky and Zanno’s research can’t say for sure. Competition with other dinosaurs could be a factor. For herbivores living around a slew of other herbivore species, there could be advantages to focusing on a specialized dietary niche that larger feathered friends couldn’t access. Makovicky also said smaller animals tend to reach maturity and reproduce at earlier ages. When the creatures ended up in environments with less abundant resources, evolving to smaller sizes could have been a way to stabilize the population.

The simultaneous changes in multiple species from one environment could also result from the nature of the geologic record.

“You might have [geologic] environments that preferentially preserve small things,” said Makovicky. The ups and downs in size could reflect shifts in what was mostly likely to be preserved, rather than in the actual sizes of the creatures.

The layman’s take-away from Makovicky and Zanno’s research is probably still the Big Bird bottom line: these theropods were huge, and they tended to get ginormous.

“There’s definitely capacity to grow very large as a herbivore, almost as large as a T-Rex,” said Makovicky. ”In some of these environments these animals would have been bigger than any of the carnivores around. But the fact that they are herbivorous alone doesn’t explain their body size evolution.”

Some of the biggest specimens were found right at the end of the Cretaceous, which was the era of big dinosaurs in general: “Everything got bigger,” Makovicky said.

The environment for everyone - right up until that pesky extinction problem made the news - seems to have turned body mass into an asset. The reason for that grand trend is one of the big questions dino experts are still struggling to answer.

Field Museum's only artist-in-residence puts wildlife to watercolor

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:44:00 -0500

When people head to The Field Museum in Chicago, they probably think more about skeletons and dinosaurs than fine art. But after a closer look at the walls, one will notice nature and wildlife beautifully rendered on canvas. The paintings are the work of Peggy Macnamara, the only artist-in-residence at the Field Museum. Her journey to that position began in the late 1980s. She spent hours at the exhibitions, simply sketching what she saw. Then, after about a decade of making the museum her studio, the head of the conservation department asked her to stay. WBEZ's Elysabeth Alfano talked with Macnamara about her process and how science and art intersect.

Meet the most venomous fish (and some other cool critters)

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:38:00 -0500

In last week’s episode, we talked to Leo Smith about his work with venomous fish and the promise they may hold for medical science. It turns out that there are more venomous fish than any other kind of animal, far more than snakes and scorpions combined. One particularly nasty one is the Reef Stonefish. He is an ugly and supposedly delicious species that holds the distinction of being the world’s most venomous fish.

Smith introduced us to the Stonefish during our visit to the “wet lab” at the Field Museum. Listen below:

To see what a Reef Stonefish looks like alive, check out these photos and videos.

Smith has led a comprehensive study that is greatly expanding the number of known venomous fish. In the extended version of our interview, he explains that venom traits evolved in fish not just once but possibly as many as 14 times. He expects that when they are done, fish will represent two-thirds of all venomous creatures. Listen below:

In addition to the venomous specimens in the lab, Smith also showed off some of the other interesting sea life in the collection. Above, he holds up a Pelican Eel. These guys live more than a half mile deep in the oceans where it is extremely cold and dark. They have two very neat features: the large pelican-like mouth you can see pretty clearly above and a bioluminescent organ in the tail that glows in the dark to attract prey.

The specimen in that big vat is a Coelacanth. It was thought to have gone extinct 80 million years ago, until a researcher discovered one in 1938. The Coelacanth is considered a “missing link” between fish and amphibians. Smith says that they are more closely related to amphibians and to us than they are to other fishes. They are interesting from an evolutionary standpoint because they have lobed fins. This means that they basically have a shoulder and are “on their way” to having arms and legs.

Clever Apes #13: Origin stories

Wed, 25 May 2011 04:28:00 -0500

Say the original Declaration of Independence burned up. No problem, you might think – we have pictures of it. But then say someone discovered that a word had been scratched out and replaced. Without the original document to examine, we might never know what that discarded word was … or how close we came to being a nation founded on the right to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of waffles.”

There’s power in the original – whether it’s a document, the mold of a famous sculpture, or the standard of a common measurement, like the kilogram.

Scientists who name a new species keep an artifact of its origin. It’s called the holotype – the standard by which a new species (or genus or subspecies) is designated. It turns out there are a whole bunch of these locked away in secure cases in Chicago – more than 500 just for mammals. It’s like a tiny National Archives of biology.

On this round of Clever Apes, we consider origins, from the concrete example of a monkey holotype, to the murk of the beginnings of consciousness. On that point, we check in with Malcolm MacIver of Northwestern, whom we visited last year to hear a choir of singing fish he helped create. Those fish inspired his theory on the origins of consciousness, which he first laid out in several blog posts. He dates it back to our emergence from the primordial oceans, when all of a sudden we could begin to see much farther. That meant more time to plan, to consider possible futures. And that, by at least one formulation, is the essence of consciousness.

As always, subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, find us on Facebook.

Clever Apes #10: Yuck

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:25:00 -0500

Let’s consider the beauty of a seething swarm of carrion beetles picking clean the carcass of a dead rat.

Sorry – were you eating breakfast?

To a scientist, that grisly scene might evoke the cycles of ecosystems, the connectedness of life and death, and the elegant efficiency of a life form sculpted by eons of evolution to be the perfect flesh-removal machine. To most of the rest of us, it’s just gross.

Yucky stuff has always been part of the mystique of science – alluring for some, forbidding for others. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider the dirty work of science, from the “bug room” at the Field Museum to the lab where scientists analyze dead critters found in food.

But we aim not to titillate. Oh no. In this part one of our two-part series, we hope to show how the yucky can also be elegant. So hold your nose and listen.

Subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook.

Front-runner Emanuel gets hit on immigration in final debate

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 05:23:00 -0600

Candidates for Chicago mayor are trying to bruise the front-runner as election day draws closer. In the final televised debate, Rahm Emanuel faced particular scrutiny on the issue of immigration.

The next mayor likely won't spend a lot of time on immigration policy, but it consumed a chunk of Thursday night's debate hosted by ABC-7 and the League of Women Voters.

Gery Chico, Carol Moseley Braun and Miguel del Valle each said Emanuel failed on immigration reform when he was in Congress and when he worked for President Obama.

"The fact of the matter is that Rahm Emanuel referred to immigration as the third rail of politics when he advised his colleagues in Congress not to pursue immigration reform," del Valle said.

"We ought to, as a nation, once and for all, figure out federal immigration reform," Chico said. "It didn't happen on Mr. Emanuel's watch as chief of staff, but I was so proud to see President Obama during the state of the Union, just recently, put it right back on the agenda."

"You have been, Mr. Emanuel, shown that you were directly involved with killing the DREAM Act when it came through, so to listen to you deny it is really kind of surprising," Moseley Braun said.

Emanuel defended his record on immigration, saying after the debate that his congressional voting record on the issue mirrored that of U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez. The Chicago Democrat has endorsed Chico, and criticized Emanuel on the immigration issue.

As for his White House record, Emanuel said when President Obama took office, he faced an immediate economic crisis.

"He made the decisions as president what to move forward, and those are the things he moved forward," Emanuel said.

Emanuel would not say what he advised the president to focus on, calling such conversations private.

Also during the one-hour debate, some of the candidates revealed who would make up their informal "kitchen cabinet" if they win the election.

Moseley Braun said she would consult family, friends and John Rogers, an investment banker and major campaign donor. Rahm Emanuel also includes a couple campaign donors on his list, including David Mosena, the head of the Museum of Science and Industry who previously worked for Mayor Daley.

Miguel del Valle was the only candidate to refuse to say specifically who'd advise him, saying he would cast a wide net.

"For too long in the city of Chicago, the mayor has been surrounded by a very small, close knit circle, and that's why gentlemen like Gery Chico got appointed to everything, because the circle is so small," del Valle said, to laughter and cheers in the crowd at the Oriental Theatre in downtown Chicago.

Chico has had stints on the boards of the Chicago Public Schools, the park district and city Colleges, as well as Mayor Richard Daley's staff. For his part, Chico said his list of advisors would include Gutierrez and former schools chief Paul Vallas, whose brother has donated to Chico's campaign.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated David Mosena's employer. He works as president and CEO of the Museum of Science and Industry.