Visiting the New Dinosaur Exhibits at the Field Museum, Chicago
Traveling to Chicago, IL for a day or weekend is usually a fun experience. On my most recent visit to the Field Museum in Chicago, I was met with an array of new prehistoric creature displays.
Maximo and the Pterosaurs
The most noticeable skeleton on display is seen when you first enter the building in the grand Stanley Field Hall. And it truly has some grand dimensions if it can hold something that size. The skeleton’s as big as life, and it’s called Maximo, otherwise shortened as simply Max.
Maximo is touted as the largest dino skeleton excavated to date. And the Field is its home for now. Maximo is a Titanosaur and has been measured to have a length over 120 feet! Titanosaurs were a group of sauropods to which the very largest of the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs belonged. Thus, it makes sense that Maximo is so magnificently gigantic. Maximo’s technical scientific classification is Patagotitan mayorum.
Along with this momentous addition came a collection of artistic restorations of pterosaurs. They are depicted flying in unison on the same course above the Titanosaur‘s skeleton. The whole magnificent addition was done, in part, for the Field’s 125th anniversary.
Antarctic Dinosaurs
With my own fascination for dinosaurs and many other prehistoric creatures, I hopped on this opportunity to see the Field’s Antarctic Dinosaurs exhibition. This particular exhibit was developed by the Field Museum and shall remain at the museum until early January of the upcoming year, after which it will go on tour.
Like the traveling Jurassic World: The Exhibition which stayed for a time at the Field Museum, Antarctic Dinosaurs has a lot of displays and interactive sets that, so I think, are geared mainly toward kids. And I have no problem with that since this is how the future generation is going to get immersed and engrossed in science.
I genuinely have a great respect for and interest in those panels of paragraphs giving the science enthusiast some figurative “meat” to chew on. Of course, the exhibit brings up the almost overused notion that some dinosaurs may have evolved into birds. A replica of a penguin is part of the exhibit, and one of the plaques accompanying it makes the famous evolutionary claim. Dr. Alan Grant would agree.
The Antarctic Dinosaurs exhibit has almost just as much to do with the history of man’s exploration into the antarctic as it does to the amazing animals themselves. The exhibit covers a handful of prehistoric species, not all of them dinosaurs, however.
The photo seen directly above was one I took when I visited the exhibition. It’s part of a group of life-like replicas of Sauropodomorphs, relatively small herbivores which were early ancestors of the long-necked sauropods.
The crown of the exhibit, the icing on the cake, has got to be Cryolophosaurus. With a length of up to 25 feet, Cryolophosaurus was a formidable carnivore in his day. And besides, the name (which means “frozen crested lizard”) just sounds cool!
This dinosaur is the cover for the very exhibit itself. The Cryolophosaurus‘ crest was a rather distinctive feature. In the replica the dino’s depicted as having feathers as it’s believed to have had in the flesh.
The coloration used in the artistic replica was based on that of the modern-day cassowary, a flightless Australian bird with some species reaching heights of five and a half feet. The cassowary’s facial coloration is similar to that of the Cryolophosaurus‘s artistic reconstruction: filled with blues and reds.
The Experience of the Exhibitions
Overall, I would say that many of the exhibits found at the Field Museum are enjoyable. They’re engaging for younger members of the family and educational to people on almost every level. And personally as a dino lover, I know I enjoyed the exhibits we checked out. They’re an interesting pastime, and you’ll probably learn something if you go.
Editor’s Note: This article appears in its native OIAI publication here.
