Where did the Field Museum’s fossil mounts come from?

Last year, I posted a quick and dirty table showing when each of the major display fossils at the Field Museum was first exhibited. This is a quick and dirty followup, based on a suggestion Lukas Rieppel made at a convening of historians of paleontology last week.

These maps illustrate where the Field Museum’s star fossils were collected. I’ve separated them by time chunks to make them easier to look at. Note that these time ranges cover year of first display, which is usually but not necessarily close to the year of collection or acquisition. Lines connect the fossils’ origins back to Chicago. Gray lines indicate fossils collected by Field Museum staff. Red lines indicate fossils that were purchased, traded for, or inherited (e.g. the transfer of the University of Chicago geology museum’s collections to the Field after its 1948 closure). Pink lines represent casts—in most cases, Field Museum scientists were involved in studying the specimens, but the originals are at other institutions.

In this first map, we see fossils coming to Chicago from two directions. There are purchased composite mounts of well-known mammals from Ice Age Europe—the Irish elk Megaloceros and the cave bear Ursus speleaus. Then there are the fossils collected by Elmer Riggs in the great plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States. Upon being hired in 1898, Riggs spent his first few field seasons in areas that were already known to yield impressive, display-caliber skeletons. He collected brontotheres in the White River badlands of South Dakota, then moved on to sauropod dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation of western Colorado.

In this map, we start to see the results of the Captain Marshall Field Expeditions to Argentina and Bolivia (1923–1927) on display. South American fossil mammals would become a specialty of Riggs and the Field Museum. The museum also collected early Paleogene fossils from Colorado, including the pantodont Barylambda. They traded with other museums for famous or important species to round out the exhibits—for example, a bison from the La Brea Tar Pits and an “American zebra” from the Hagerman quarry in Idaho.

The collections inherited from the University of Chicago make a big impact on the midcentury map. All of the Field Museum’s display skeletons of Permian animals from Texas and South Africa were part of that acquisition. Meanwhile, the board of trustees arranged to purchase a Canadian Daspletosaurus from the American Museum of Natural History, which was displayed alongside a Lambeosaurus collected by Riggs and company in 1922.

With the exception of a new cast skull for Apatosaurus, no significant changes or additions were made to the fossil halls between 1961 and the early 1990s.

The last 30 years have seen the greatest range of origin points for fossils on display: everything from Arctodus, collected just a couple hundred miles away in Indiana to Cryolophosaurus from Antarctica. This map also shows a near-total change in focus from Cenozoic and Permian animals to Mesozoic dinosaurs. And while earlier dinosaur displays were mostly from North America, there has been particular interest in this period in dinosaurs from the global south.

I’m going to stop there and leave the rest to you, dear reader. Beyond my brief notes here, what other trends do these maps suggest? What connections to global or local political or cultural trends do you see? Are there other museums where you know or suspect a different pattern? Feel free to comment!