Embedded Files
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
The Earliest Bird's Mouth Reveals the Origins of Avian Feeding
Based on the Field Museum's Chicago Archaeopteryx — on public display since 2024 — Dr. Jingmai O'Connor and her team identified three structures in the world's earliest known bird never before documented in any fossil: oral papillae (fleshy projections on the roof of the mouth that guide food and prevent choking), a hyoid tongue bone (enabling a mobile, manipulative tongue), and a bill-tip organ (a nerve-rich structure at the beak tip for locating food tactilely). All three are present in living birds today, placing their evolutionary origin at 150 million years ago.
The findings provide new criteria for distinguishing true birds from non-avian dinosaur relatives and show that sophisticated feeding adaptations evolved in parallel with flight from the very beginning, likely necessary to meet the high metabolic cost of powered locomotion.
"These discoveries show a really clear shift in how dinosaurs were feeding when they started flying and had to meet the enormous energetic demands of flight.", says Dr. Jingmai O'Connor
The results were made possible by preparators Akiko Shinya and Connie Van Beek, who used ultraviolet light throughout more than a year of specimen preparation to detect soft tissue traces invisible under normal illumination.
The research has been covered in dozens of news outlets around the world, with an estimated reach of 333 million potential readers. You can find coverage in Popular Science, Discover Magazine, Nautilus, IFL Science, and Earth.com, along with news aggregators like MSN and Yahoo that have reshared these articles to their even wider reader base. WTTW, who partnered with us on a big package of Archie content for the unveil in 2024, also mentioned the latest research in their e-newsletter, with links back to their larger body of work on the fossil and its exhibit.
Publication: The Innovation (Cell Press), cover article, February 2026
Lipstick vine surprises
This research focused on a plant called Aeschynanthus acuminatus. Most of its relatives have long, red, tube-shaped flowers (they're from a group of plants whose common name is "lipstick vine"), but A. acuminatus has short, wide, yellowish-green flowers.
Most of the lipstick vines live in mainland Asia, where their tube-shaped flowers accommodate long-beaked sunbirds that act as pollinators. But A. acuminatus lives in both mainland Asia and on Taiwan, which doesn't have sunbirds. For botanists like Jing-Yi Lu (Research Associate) and Rick Ree (MacArthur Curator of Flowering Plants and Section Head, Life Sciences), that launched lots of questions-- did A. acuminatus's ancestors arrive on sunbird-less Taiwan and have to evolve new flowers to accommodate the island's shorter-beaked birds? And for the A. acuminatus plants living in mainland Asia, do sunbirds pollinate them along with short-beaked birds? A combination of extensive fieldwork observing birds pollinating these flowers and genetic analysis showing when and where A. acuminatus branched off from its more lipstick-shaped cousins revealed a surprising truth: it actually split off into its short-flowered form back on the mainland, before it arrived in sunbird-less Taiwan. This finding contradicts the predictions of a long-standing biological model that predicts that pollinators drive speciation in plants.
The press release has been widely covered by press in the US and around the world, including CNN, Popular Science, Scientific American, Dutch National Geographic, Latin American Infobae, Russian Dzen.
Publication: New Phytologist
The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time
The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time
How can we tell from urban planning, architecture, and art whether or not an ancient society was autocratic or democratic? Gary Feinman (MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology) and colleagues recently published a study in Science Advances, drawing insights from 31 ancient societies across Europe, the Americas, and Asia across thousands of years.
They concluded that many ancient societies beyond Greece and Rome had inclusive political systems, despite widespread perception that these were the only two democratic societies in the ancient world. Contributing factors to and indicators of whether a society tended to be autocratic or democratic include the layout and orientation of public spaces and infrastructure; state revenue sources; depictions of rulers; and economic inequality. Hear from Gary on the national broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered, and read more from Earth.com and ColumbiaOne. Since its publication two weeks ago, the study has been featured in more than 125 articles, published in 11 languages.
The best way to reach the NIRC in regards to any inquiries is through email:
Page updated
Report abuse