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Scientific inquiry is at the center of the Field Museum and housed in the Negaunee Integrative Research Center. This is where community of curators, research scientists, postdoctoral scientists, resident graduate students, and many more associated scholars, undergraduate student interns, and volunteers collaborate to perform this important work. The Field Museum has adopted an integrative approach to research, building on its traditional strengths in Archeology, Anthropology, Botany, Mycology, Meteoritics, Paleontology, and Zoology. This cross-disciplinary enterprise is unlocking some of nature's greatest mysteries.
RECENT NEWS
Rules Of Thumb
The recent Science cover story highlights groundbreaking research on the evolution of rodent thumbnails, based on an extensive study of 433 genera. The team discovered that 86% of rodents have thumbnails, a feature that likely played a key role in dexterous food handling and ecological diversification.
This study was only possible thanks to the Field Museum’s world-renowned mammal collection—one of the largest in the world—which provided the critical specimens for analysis. Field Museum scientists Rafaela Missagia, Anderson Feijó, and Bruce Patterson were among the lead authors of the study, underscoring the global impact of the museum’s collections and expertise.
Cretaceous Insect life in South America
The first-ever insects preserved in amber from tropical South America have been discovered in Ecuador’s Hollín Formation, dating to about 112 million years ago.
The study, published in Communications Earth & Environment and coauthored by Fabiany Herrera, Associate Curator of Paleobotany, reveals exquisitely preserved arthropods trapped in “aerial amber” from araucariacean trees, alongside fossil plants that record early tropical forests of ferns, conifers, gnetales, and the earliest flowering plants. This groundbreaking find provides direct fossil evidence of Cretaceous insect life in South America and has already garnered global media attention.
Amazonian Tropical Tree Species
A new study in PNAS by Senior Research Scientists/Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist Nigel Pitman and colleagues shows that Amazonian and Andean tree communities are not keeping pace with current climate warming.
Using 40+ years of data on over 66,000 trees from more than 2,500 species in Peru and Bolivia, the team found that shifts toward warmer-climate species (“thermophilization”) are occurring, but much more slowly than regional temperature increases. The results suggest most tropical tree species, particularly in the Amazon, are unlikely to move upslope fast enough to adapt to ongoing climate change.
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