2023 News

>  “Modeling the Chronology of a Protohistoric Site using Radiocarbon and Trade Good Dates: Middle Grant Creek,” in Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology  is an attempt to model the full suite of chronological information available for the Middle Grant Creek site (MGC) located near the Kankakee and Des Plaines Rivers southwest of present-day Chicago using a Bayesian statistical approach. The aim was to produce a more quantitative and statistically reliable estimate of the site’s occupation dates. The team used the LA-ICP-MS to obtain compositional results from 27 copper-based artifacts to estimate when they might have appeared at the site. Although this approach is not without challenges, it was determined that the site was occupied for a fairly short period at the turn of the 17th century. The photo at the left shows a copper artifact from the site.

>  Laure is also co-author of “Glass ornaments from southwestern Taiwan: new light on maritime glass exchange across Southeast, South and West Asia in the early-mid 1st millennium CE,” in Heritage Science. The research stems from an international collaborative effort including the EAF and Dr. Kuan-Wen Wang at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and attempts to shed light on the long-distance connection of sites located in Southern Taiwan during the 1st millennium CE (1st to 8th century CE) via the study of the compositions of glass beads found in this region. The LA-ICP-MS results provide evidence of the existence of multiple long-distance glass exchange networks that directly or indirectly connected Taiwan to Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and possibly the Mediterranean region.

>  Then there is “Diversity on the Altiplano: Geochemical perspectives on 3,000 years of potting practices in the Lake Titicaca basin,” the most recent addition to the special issue of Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports on Peruvian ceramics edited by Elizabeth Grávalos, Ryan Williams and Luis Muro. This article combines five LA-ICP-MS datasets obtained by different teams on ceramics and clay samples from the Lake Titicaca basin and covering a period of 3000 years. The article presents specific case studies, then addresses how shifting scales of locality impact the chemical signatures explored, the potential for comparative analyses across the region, and future directions for research collaborations.

December 22. 2023

A newly described species of stream-dwelling frog from Southeast Asia makes things a bit more interesting by virtue of the two bony “fangs” that jut out of its jawbone, as described in a new paper in PLOS ONE by postdoctoral scientist Jeff Frederick and co-authors. Fanged frogs are not unknown. They use their fangs to battle with each other over territory and mates, and sometimes even to hunt tough-shelled prey like giant centipedes and crabs. However, this one, named Limnonectes phyllofolia, is the smallest one ever discovered. “This new species is tiny compared to other fanged frogs on the island where it was found, about the size of a quarter,” says Jeff. “Many frogs in this genus are giant, weighing up to two pounds. At the large end, this new species weighs about the same as a dime.” The frogs hail from Sulawesi, a rugged, mountainous island that makes up part of Indonesia, and whose biodiversity is, in Jeff’s words, “unreal.” While most amphibians lay their eggs in water, during fieldwork on Sulawesi, Jeff and team were surprised to find terrestrial egg masses on leaves and mossy boulders several feet above the ground, and soon began seeing the small, brown frogs themselves. Closer examination of the amphibian parents revealed not only that they were tiny members of the fanged frog family, complete with barely-visible fangs, but that the frogs caring for the clutches of eggs were all male—not unheard of, but not common. 

As Jeff concludes, “most of the animals that live in places like Sulawesi are quite unique, and habitat destruction is an ever-looming conservation issue for preserving the hyper-diversity of species we find there. Learning about animals like these frogs that are found nowhere else on Earth helps make the case for protecting these valuable ecosystems.” The discovery received international media coverage, most of which can be reviewed here.

December 22. 2023

Maria was part of an international expedition in Antarctica in late December of last year aimed at identifying possible new meteorite stranding zones in the area surrounding the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) station in the Sør Rondane Mountains. Just out in Antarctic Record is a comprehensive report on the mission, co-authored by Maria and Philipp. The report details all aspects of the trip, complete with coordinates and discoveries. The team recovered four meteorites during the first phase of the expedition, and another one in the second phase. They also collected nine surface ice samples and 18 kg of micrometeorite-bearing sediments. Preliminary classification, performed on-site using magnetic susceptibility, tentatively indicated that the meteorites were H and L chondrites. The recovered meteorites were transported in frozen state to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels to be thawed in vacuum conditions and classified based on their mineralogy. One site, the Nils Larsenfjellet, has been identified as a potential new “Dense Collection Area.”

Maria is now also a part-time professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Department of Liberal Arts, teaching cosmochemistry and meteoritics to art students. As she reports, “the course is pretty science-heavy, but I also place a lot of emphasis on exploring the ‘art’ of the Solar System and the universe more broadly.” For their final project, she had the students develop art pieces inspired by a topic or method covered in class. “I was blown away by their creativity,” she declares. A few examples are depicted at the left, and you can watch two videos at this link, one made from Chandra X-ray data transcribed into sounds and then mixed into a dance track, and a sound and light installation simulating the Big Bang. Maria adds, “I was thrilled to see the students take inspiration for their own work from the material we covered in class. Teaching this course and seeing the outcome emphasized to me that the line between art and science is blurry, and often they seek to answer the same questions—just in different ways.”

December 22. 2023

In a review essay entitled “Maya Archaeology Looking Forward,” he synthesized and expanded on the findings from eight books for the Latin American Research Review. He is also one of 22 authors of a “Project Gallery” piece for the journal Antiquity. This short article is the first from the Global Dynamics of Inequality project, and is titled, “The Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project: analyzing archaeological housing data.” This team of authors currently is working on the submission of a suite of papers for an invited special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

December 22. 2023

Here is the abstract of the authors’ response:

We endorse many of the practices advocated by Byrne, including the storage of tissues, recordings, photos, and other data; embracing new technologies such as massively parallel DNA sequencing, μCT scanning, and stable isotope analysis; and large-scale digitization of collections and associated metadata. Indeed, many of these practices are widely used by museums today. We also welcome the call to provide stable financial support to maintain and expand the infrastructure of existing collections. However, we do not support the call to use new technologies “to replace the need for whole animal bodies.” Byrne’s position overstates the potential of new technologies to replace specimen-based research and fails to acknowledge the importance of whole-organism-based research in building the foundations of modern biology and in continuing to promote new discoveries. Our intention is not to address all the claims or ethical assumptions made by Byrne. We fully realize that collecting specimens is not necessary or desirable in certain circumstances, and we value the scientific contributions of researchers who choose not to collect whole animals. The importance and ethics of scientific collecting have been reviewed in many recent papers. Rather, our goal is to underscore the tremendous value of ongoing, whole-organism specimen collection by highlighting some of the key scientific and societal gains that arise from this research.

Whole-organism specimens enable many kinds of research that would be difficult or impossible to conduct in a comprehensive way with nonlethal samples such as recordings or photos. A few examples of research enabled by whole-organism specimens and their associated tissues and data illustrate the value of museum collections.

• Discovery and description of new species

• The origins and spread of infectious diseases

• Studies of environmental degradation such as the accumulation of microplastics and mercury in fish or DDT in eggshells

• Most research on endoparasites and small invertebrates (which constitute the majority of all animals)

• Research on morphology and physiology of whole organisms

• Studies of gene expression and epigenetic modifications in wild animals, including gene regulatory changes associated with adaptation to different environments

• Research that links genomic variation to phenotypic differences

• Studies of the biotic consequences of global change in the Anthropocene

• A global scientific resource for future studies and future technologies

December 8. 2023

The fossils, small, round rocks patterned with lines that look like leaves, were collected by Padre Gustavo Huertas, a Colombian priest/scientist near a town called Villa de Levya; he classified them in 2003 as a type of fossil plant, naming it Sphenophyllum colombianum. The fossils come from Early Cretaceous rocks, which raised questions in Fabiany and Héctor’s minds when they examined them in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia paleo collection. Other members of the genus died out more than 100 million years earlier, and certain key features didn’t indicate plants. They brought in paleontologist Edwin-Alberto Cadena at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá and his student, Diego Cómbita-Romero of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who confirmed the specimen was the inside of the carapace of a post-hatchling turtle (a year old or less). The re-examination, detailed in Palaeontologia Electronica, indicates that the features Padre Huertas thought were leaves and stems are actually the modified rib bones and vertebrae that make up a turtle’s shell. Dr. Cadena notes that fossil hatchling turtles are rare because the bones in their shells are very thin and can be easily destroyed. The fact that these fossils were found in the same rocks as the Early Cretaceous marine turtle Desmatochelys padillai leads Dr. Cadena to think that the hatchlings might belong to that species, which could grow to around 15 feet.

Fittingly, the team nicknamed the specimens “Turtwig,” after a Pokémon that’s half-turtle, half-plant. Fabiany is keen to stress the importance of these fossils in the broader scope of Colombian paleontology. “We resolved a small paleobotanical mystery, but this study shows the need to re-study historical collections in Colombia. The Early Cretaceous is a critical time in land plant evolution. Our future job is to discover the forests that grew in this part of the world.” For more info, read the press release, and coverage in The Guardian, Cosmos Magazine and Popular Science, among many more outlets.

December 8. 2023

The book brings together case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications. Gary and Linda’s contribution focuses on Oaxaca cuisine 1,200 to 1,500 years ago, during the Classic period (ca. 300–900 CE). Prehispanic patterns of exchange and interaction serve as a microcosm of the larger-scale and more distant exchange networks that have brought foodstuffs from around the world to Oaxaca without erasing deep historic local traditions and preferences.

December 8. 2023

The ship will stay in the area, exploring Dorado and other seamounts daily until the dive time is up on the evening of December 13. The goal of this cruise is to collect: deployments made during the highly successful June 2023 Octopus Odyssey cruise, samples of the warm water in which the octopus brood their eggs, additional geophysical data, and octopod specimens, for testing the hypothesis that the warm water wafting up from the seafloor inoculates them with a microbe that gives them an edge for survival. To watch video live-streamed from the seafloor 3100 meters below (whenever the Remotely Operated Vehicle SuBastian is in the water), or get a link to the YouTube channel which will have all of the prerecorded video, visit: https://schmidtocean.org/cruise/octopus-odyssey-too/

December 8. 2023

Cistecephalus was also one of the first synapsids to be described (named by Sir Richard Owen in 1876) and its high abundance in certain strata in the Karoo Basin of South Africa make it an important fossil making age correlations between fossil localities. Despite its notoriety, however, many aspects of the anatomy of Cistecephalus remain relatively obscure. The last detailed treatment of the anatomy of its skull was published in 1973 by South African paleontologist Andre Keyser, and even that work included only limited information on the internal details of important areas such as the braincase. Happily, that situation has now changed thanks to the work of a team of collaborators from Mozambique, South Africa, France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States that includes Curator Ken Angielczyk. In a chapter in a newly published festschift volume honoring Southern Method University Professor Emeritus Louis Jacobs, the team used CT-scan data to provide an in-depth bone-by-bone description of the skull of Cistecephalus, as well as reconstructions of its brain and inner ear based on the spaces in the skull that accommodated these soft tissues. The paper also addresses s everal related issues, such as the probability that Cistecephalus was warm-blooded like modern mammals (unlikely, despite recent claims that some of its very close relatives were warm-blooded), and the process by which certain bones of the skull were lost of dicynodonts’ evolutionary history. Together, the information presented in the paper provides a new foundation for understanding the paleobiology of Cistecephalus, and early evolutionary experiments that foreshadow the extreme ecomorphological diversity observed in mammals today.

December 8. 2023

Last year, Curator Ken Angielczyk was a member of a team of researchers that published a paper examining how the dimensions of the tiny semi-circular canals in the inner ear, which play a key role in balance and sensing movements of the head, could be used to make predictions about the body temperatures of fossil animals. They found that mammal-like endothermy evolved relatively late in the forerunners of mammals, about 230 million years ago in animals quite close to the origin of mammals. However, their sample included relatively few fossils from the critical time interval and section of the family tree, which made it hard for them to pin down when warm-bloodedness emerged. To try to answer this question more completely, the team is now working on a follow-up effort that includes more specimens to fill in their sampling gap, and to support this effort. Accordingly, in mid-November Ken traveled to the European Synchotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, to scan specimens of the group of ancient mammal relatives called cynodonts. Ken and collaborators Romain David (Natural History Museum), Leonardo Kerber (Universidade Federal do Santa Maria), and Vincent Fernandez (ESRF) obtained high-resolution scans of 12 cynodonts, including two specimens from the Field Museum's collection and one specimen collected by Ken and colleagues in Tanzania. The work necessary to make 3D renderings of the inner ears of these specimens is just beginning, but from the preliminary data, the team is confident that they will be able to collect new data from nearly all of the specimens.

December 8. 2023

The event, attended by students, Fossil Preparators, Collection Managers, and Curators, was created to welcome new FMNH staff and students, learn about everyone’s accomplishments over the past year, and develop ways to help each other’s work in 2024. 

Xin Yang, Field Museum Resident Graduate Student (University of Chicago) received the Hadean Award. The award recognizes graduate student excellence, and is named for the first and oldest of the four known geologic eons of Earth's history (derives from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld). Xin came to Chicago in 2019 with a B.A. in Geochemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China. During his time in Chicago, where he collaborates with Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies Philipp Heck, he has made commendable progress in isotope geochemistry and cosmochemistry thanks to his analytical skills, collaborative spirit and strong work ethic. Notably, his efforts led to a first author publication in Nature Astronomy  on his discovery of the first record of a new geological process that rejuvenates surfaces of asteroids. Xin’s main research focus involves the first minerals that formed in the Solar System that were the building blocks of the planets. He uses Scanning Electron Microscopy, Raman, XCT scanning, mass spectrometry, and combines these techniques with dynamical modeling to provide new insights into the activity and evolution of the young Sun and early Solar System. He is a great Field Museum citizen and always there to support colleagues by providing help with analytical tools like Raman, SEM, and modeling.

December 8. 2023

Early on, John was perhaps best known for his fieldwork and research in Papau, New Guinea, but over the past decade John has turned his attention toward the possibilities of applying network analysis in the study of humans, and in between played a leading role in the Museum’s inclusion of Indigenous voices in the understanding and care of our collections, notably, but not limited to, fostering the co-curation of our Philippine collections by Chicago’s Filipinx community. Since the 2010s, after publishing innumerable journal articles and book chapters, John has turned his attention to book-length studies, including A Talent for Friendship (Oxford, 2014), Understanding the Human Mind (Routledge, 2020), and, most recently, Modeling the Past (Berghan Books, 2023). As we have observed so many times, “retirement” for our curators does not mean an end to the work. John, especially, is not the “retiring” type—as witnessed by a chapter entitled “Network Models and the Past: Relational Thinking and Contingency Analysis” in a new edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research and the launch of a new series from Berghahn Books entitled “Explanations in the Social Sciences,” to be edited by John and former FMNH postdocs Mark Golitko (University of Notre Dame) and Luis Muro Ynoñán (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who will be joining the Museum staff in March): short, authoritative books that each explore a single question about the demands and challenges of being human.

New to the Anthropology staff is Christina Friberg, the new Assistant Curator of North American Anthropology (a joint appointment with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Anthropology). Christina comes from a Research Scientist position at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where she curated a collaborative exhibit on the people of the Angel Mounds site in Evansville, Indiana and their descendants today (opening date TBA). Christina received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018, and her research focuses on Midwestern archaeology, particularly the broader impacts of large Mississippian period sites like Cahokia on outlying communities, and the impacts of endemic warfare on daily life. She is the author of the book The Making of Mississippian Tradition (University Press of Florida, 2020), and has published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, SAA Archaeological Record, Southeastern Archaeology, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and most recently, Journal of Field Archaeology. In addition to her extensive museum experience, Christina also has a long history of collaboration with Native communities. She is excited to continue this work with the Field Museum team.

November 24. 2023

Dead coral rocks in the ocean erode much faster than rocks on land, as they are rapidly being leached, drilled into, and excavated by various invertebrate organisms, most prominent among them sponges and coral-boring bivalves. Rüdiger noticed increasing numbers of such boring bivalves at his Florida Keys reef restoration sites, and wondered whether the cause was opportunistic local species or a potential invasion by non-native forms. One species in particular, Botula fusca (aka the cinnamon mussel) piqued his interest, in part because it had long been the subject of debate, posited by some as a single circumtropical species, and by others as a complex of multiple regional forms. Traditional morphological character systems were of little help to address the questions, as these members of the mytilid mussel family show few species-specific features in their shell or anatomy (such as shell sculpture, hinge teeth, or muscle-attachment scars), which readily distinguish closely related species in other bivalve groups. In fact, specimens from French Polynesia and Madagascar looked the same as those from the Florida Keys (photo). Rüdiger and his coauthors, Research Associate Timothy Rawlings (Cape Breton University) and Sarah Hayes (Cape Breton student and lead author, for whom this was a training project in her Honors program) analyzed multiple molecular markers to tackle this problem. The results were surprising: not only is the “cinnamon mussel” a large complex of genetically distinct species, even the populations at the reef restoration site in the Florida Keys belong to at least two different species, one of which is more closely related to Pacific forms and might be a recent arrival. The study, entitled “Boring Bivalves: Using Molecular Phylogenetics to Resolve Species Identities in Botula (Mytilidae),” appears in American Malacological Bulletin. The team is now expanding the project to include a wider range of not-so-boring bivalves in this complex. 

November 24. 2023

Knowledge about these differences is important to better care for captive animals and enhance their survival in reintroductions, and to understand how plasticity may influence morphology. A new study by Curator Emeritus of Mammals Bruce Patterson and co-authors was based on an extraordinary sample of 889 specimens held in 26 museum collections in 11 Eastern Hemisphere countries, assembled by coauthor Nobby Yamaguchi. The team assembled a total of 56 morphological measurements of skulls and mandibles from captive and wild lions and tigers throughout their historical ranges. David Cooper of the National Museums Scotland led the analysis of linear morphometrics to identify differences in size and shape. Skull size does not differ between captive and wild lions and tigers, but skull and mandible shape does. The differences observed between captive and wild animals varied in parallel between males and females and between lions and tigers. Consistently, differences occur in regions associated with biting, indicating that diet has influenced forces acting upon the skull and mandible. The diets of captive big cats used in their study predominantly consisted of whole or partial carcasses, which closely resemble the mechanical properties of wild diets. Thus, the authors speculate that the additional impacts of killing, manipulating and consuming large prey in the wild have driven the observed differentiation between captive and wild big cats.

November 24. 2023

Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests are characterized by considerable uncertainty and there is no comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation for benchmarking these estimates. In this study, the researchers combine several ground-sourced and satellite-derived approaches to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands. Despite regional variation, the predictions demonstrated remarkable consistency at a global scale, with only a 12% difference between the ground-sourced and satellite-derived estimates. At present, global forest carbon storage is markedly under the natural potential, with a total deficit of 226 Gigatons in areas with low human footprint. Most of this potential (61%) is in areas with existing forests, in which ecosystem protection can allow forests to recover to maturity, with the remaining 39% in regions where forests have been removed or fragmented. Although forests cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions, the results of the study support the idea that the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of diverse forests offer valuable contributions to meeting global climate and biodiversity targets. Click here for a sampling of news coverage including Mother Jones, The Guardian, Mongabay, National Geographic/Spain, Bild der Wissenschaft, and more.

November 24. 2023

The first two weeks of October were spent in the baobab forests of the central west with Dr. Riana Ramanantsalama, a Humboldt postdoc at the German Primate Center in Goettingen, for a study of different viruses circulating in the local mammal community. Just under 300 individual small mammals and bats were sampled, as well as dogs, goats, lemurs, and carnivores. The period of the study occurred at the end of the dry season, and Riana and Steve will return to the site towards the end of the rainy period, probably in March 2024, to resample and look for possible seasonal differences. After four days in Antananarivo, during which a student of Steve's presented her Master's degree at the University of Antananarivo on the ecology of bat ectoparasites, Steve and colleagues from Association Vahatra went to a Central Highland site known as Ambohitantely for a field school and research visit. Twelve young Master's students from the University of Antananarivo took part in the exercise, as well as a colleague from the University of La Reunion and a Ph.D. student from the same institution. This is a site Steve and colleagues have been working for several decades on a range of different research projects, including cycles of bubonic plague, which in an epidemiological sense is endemic to the local forest. Further, a few years back, Association Vahatra started a large-scale forest restoration project at the site, which represents one of the last remnant Central Highlands montane forests, so the students also planted a lot of trees during the field school. The group associated with the field school, which was supported by Steve's Fulbright grant, was able to profit from a simple biological station at the site recently constructed by Association Vahatra, in collaboration with Madagascar National Parks. A considerable number of small mammals and their ectoparasites, as well as soil samples, were collected and will soon be tested at a lab on La Reunion for plague and a variety of viruses. Steve returned for a short week to Antananarivo during which a Ph.D. student presented her thesis on subfossil birds from a cave in southwestern Madagascar; Steve noted with pleasure that all four other thesis committee members were his former students and now professors in the national university system. He then left Antananarivo for the extreme north to conduct a reconnaissance trip to a protected area known as Andrafiamena-Andavakoera to pick three sites for a large-scale biological inventory. This protected area is one of the few named sites on the island Steve and colleagues have not inventoried and other than some work on local lemurs is poorly known; the work is financed by a grant from the Agence française de développement. With the three forest sites picked, Steve traveled to Antsiranana to meet a group of 20 biologists (botanists, herpers, birders, and mammalogists), mostly Malagasy, for a month-long field trip.

November 24. 2023

JMIH took place over July 10 to 17 and was attended by 14 FMNH staff, students, and associates–and approximately 500 people attended in total. Delegates from Action, Collections, and Integrative Research presented papers covering a range of topics, including identifying freshwater conservation priority areas in Guyana, the role of museums in archiving environmental DNA (eDNA) samples for research, and the biogeography and phylogenetics of Neotropical cichlids.

A highlight of the meeting was the award of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) Spiritus Award to Alan Resetar, the Museum's former Amphibians & Reptiles Collections Manager, in recognition of his excellent service in managing the Field Museum herps collections and facilitating global research for 30+ years. Justin Bernstein, Assistant Curator Sara Ruane’s former grad student, won the ASIH award for Best Student Paper (Herpetology) in Ichthyology and Herpetology for the paper “Undescribed diversity in a widespread common group of Asian mud snakes,” which involved many FMNH specimens, included both Sara and Curator Emeritus Harold Voris as co-authors, and honored FMNH Research Associate John Murphy by naming a new species of snake after him. Sara presented the Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology to professor Maureen Donnelly of FIU, and took part in a meeting of the Executive Council of the Herpetologist’s League, on which she serves.

Field Museum scientists authored/co-authored 10 contributed papers, talks, and abstracts at the Botany 2023 conference from July 22 to 26. Assistant Curator of Paleobotany Fabiany Herrera and postdoc Mike D’Antonio delivered new results about Mazon Creek plants and the enigmatic Paleozoic genus Stigmaria. Other paleobotanical topics included Neotropical fossil grapes, palm fruits from the Oligocene of Peru, and CO2 estimates from the early Cretaceous of Mongolia. Mike was also awarded the Michael Cichan Paleobotanical Research Grant for his work on Paleozoic plants. Resident Grad Student, Jing-Yi Lu (UChicago) presented a talk about pollinator shifts and geographic range evolution in the origin of Aeschynanthus acuminatus, co-authored by Curator Richard Ree, and Rick’s UChicago student Samantha Kish-Levine presented a poster on modeling the ranges of cryptic species of Pedicularis in California based on their host-plant associations. Finally, Assistant Curator of Pteridophytes Weston Testo and coauthors delivered multiple talks about the evolutionary origin of Neotropical ferns.

August 11. 2023

A large proportion of these nodules contain fossil plants of Middle Pennsylvanian age (~300 million years ago) that often have excellent three-dimensional morphology and sometimes anatomical detail. Approximately 80 plant taxa have been recognized from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte, but few have been studied in detail, and in some cases the systematic affinities of these fossils need reevaluation. The three-dimensional (3D) preservation of Mazon Creek fossil plants makes them ideal candidates for study using x-ray micro-computed tomography (μCT), and that is exactly what Assistant Curator Fabiany Herrera and an interdisciplinary team undertook for a new study in Frontiers in Earth Science. Their aim was to use these techniques to more accurately reconstruct the morphology of specimens of the fossil plant genera Tetraphyllostrobus and Crossotheca. They studied the mineralogical composition of the fossil plant preservation using elemental maps and Raman spectroscopy, and used differential interference contrast, Airyscan confocal super-resolution microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy to examine in-situ spores, revealing different features of the spores with different degrees of clarity. The analyses showed that μCT can provide excellent detail on the three-dimensional structure of Mazon Creek plant fossils, with the nature of associated mineralization sometimes enhancing and sometimes obscuring critical information. Results provide guidance for selecting and prioritizing fossil plant specimens preserved in siderite concretions for future research. The research team comprised colleagues from the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, University of Michigan, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, University Chicago, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and included Collections Associate Jack Wittry, postdoc Mike D’Antonio, Resident Grad Student Yuke Zheng and Curator Philipp Heck (Pritzker Meteoritics Center), and Research Associate/Trustee Peter Crane (Yale/Oak Spring).

August 11. 2023

The furthest accessible nest for Peregrin Falcons from Chicago is in Peoria, where three female chicks were banded. At Rockford, the most-watched site due to its year-round webcam, two boys and a girl were banded. The site with the most aggressive adult, Owena, is St. Mary’s Hospital (two girls banded). This is Owena’s seventh year breeding at St. Mary's; she was banded in 2013 as a chick in Racine, WI. The oldest nest site is on Wacker, occupied for the past 37 years (two girls and a boy). This is a different Wacker site than the one with the defensive adult female that was recently in the news (like Daily Mail, ABC7, HuffPost)—three young recently fledged from that site. The Pilsen site has four chicks (three girls and a boy). “The biggest highlight,” says Mary, “might have been when we were able to capture the adult female at our UIC site, with the help of Birds Collections Manager Ben Marks. She previously was un-banded but now is currently sporting some new bling!” The banding process is a critical tactic in supporting the peregrine population. Click here for more information about Illinois Peregrines. To date, over 800 young peregrines have been banded by the Chicago Peregrine Program.

Just as the Peregrine season winds down, the Purple Martin field season begins. Mammals Research Assistant Lauren Nassef monitors the South Shore houses and coordinates the banding work between all the sites. This summer saw the second year in the Field Museum’s long-term study of banded populations of purple martin colonies. Nestlings and adult martins were captured at five sites along Chicago’s lakefront. Individuals were banded and blood collected in order to determine paternity and lifetime fitness of individuals. Auxiliary markers were used to aid in the study of movement between colonies and note paternity of nestlings. The highlight recapture was of a Second-year (SY) adult female that was banded as a nestling last year in Alabama, a town in Genesee County, New York, which is a 570-mile journey. Banding is always a cooperative effort and this year included a number of Field Museum staff, students and volunteers.

August 11. 2023

Much of the progress has been made by conducting detailed, intensive, carefully focused field surveys that aim to fully document the fauna of a given region, followed, back at the Museum, by extensive study of specimens and compilation of data on distribution, habitat selection, and abundance. One of the project’s primary collaborators from the Institute of Biology at the University of the Philippines, Aloy Duya, arrived at FMNH on July 6 for over a month of research, supported by the Museum’s Science and Scholarship Funding Committee. Aloy and Larry (with additional collaborators) are now focused on publishing the results of their field research on Mindoro Island, an isolated oceanic island of about 9,000 km2, that has been little studied despite being near to Manila. With lots of expert assistance from Research Assistant Lauren Nassef, documentation is proceeding full speed ahead. Analyses thus far indicate that of the 17 native non-flying mammals, 93% (14) are endemic to the island; this includes five previously undescribed species, making this one of the most highly distinctive mammal faunas for any island of its size. Additionally, at least five species of bats are endemic to the island, including some spectacular flying foxes with wingspans of about three feet. These data will be published as part of the project’s efforts to understand the biogeography and evolutionary history of the Philippine mammal fauna, and also to contribute to the currently increasing effort to protect the island’s biodiversity overall, including government-led, national-level assessments of species conservation status and critical areas for conservation.

August 11. 2023

Based on Luis’ extensive excavations at the Moche site of Huaca La Capilla-San Jose de Moro (AD 650–740), Jequetepeque Valley, northern Peru, the paper examines the potent political and religious role of Moche deathscapes, which are considered spaces of liminality between life and death, of negotiation of political power, and reinvention of the Moche time-space. The article argues that Huaca La Capilla, a monumental construction located within the elite Moche cemetery of San José de Moro, was the dynamic locus within a mythologized Moche mortuary landscape. The striking resemblances between this huaca’s interior plazas and those depicted in the Moche iconographic scene of the “Burial Theme” are intriguing, suggesting that Huaca La Capilla was the locus of body-centered performances that preceded the lavish burial of Moche elite individuals in the cemetery. This study incorporates a multi-scalar approach to the study of landscapes of death in the Pre-Hispanic Andes and their diverse spatial and material practices, contributing to discussions of how mortuary landscapes and their monuments were involved in the (re)production of myths of ancestrality and particular notions of time, history, and construction of the being that gave political legitimacy to ruling groups in times of crisis. The article is available for free download at the SAGE Publications website at the link above for a limited time. Please contact Luis (lmuro@fieldmuseum.org) for a PDF.

August 11. 2023

Stones and Bones is the field paleontology course for advanced high school students offered through the University of Chicago. It includes two weeks in Chicago and two in the field in Wyoming. This is Lance's final year with the class due to his retirement.

The Fossil Butte Member deposits of the Green River Formation in Southwestern Wyoming preserves a 52-million-year-old community of plants and animals that collectively provide the best picture of how the North American biota was recovering after the end of Cretaceous mass extinction event (an event which took out around 80% of all species living at the time). Lance’s book The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time (University of Chicago Press, 2013) is the key work on this locality (and the textbook for the course). Having decided that this would be his last year teaching the course, Lance invited the Field’s newest generation of paleo curators—Fabiany Herrera (Assistant Curator, Fossil Plants), and Jingmai O’Connor (Associate Curator, Fossil Reptiles)—to join the dig in 2022 and this year, so they could meet the quarry operators, land owners, and other relevant parties, as well as get a feel for teaching the course. Among the finds were a large plant fossil that may be a cacao ancestor and, discovered by Lance on the last day of the trip, a well-preserved bird.

Of course, if you want a close-up look at the beautiful preservation of the Green River fossils, take a walk through the Fossil Lake Gallery in Evolving Planet.

July 28. 2023

Prehispanic Mesoamerica included areas of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador. In addition to Caracol, Mesoamerican cities examined within the article include Chunchucmil, Monté Alban and Teotihuacan in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala. These and other Mesoamerican cities prospered despite a lack of modern technologies and without basic resources such as wheeled transport or domesticated animals such as oxen, mules or donkeys to carry loads. The authors maintain that despite history often depicting the fall of Maya cities, their resiliency for centuries is often overlooked. Such resiliency can be attributed to enhanced infrastructure that included roads, access to markets and agricultural terracing. Likewise, these cities supported advanced socio-economic systems that included structured governance, institutions and social norms. Ultimately, they withstood a number of environmental challenges such as drought, earthquakes, heavy rains, hurricanes and rising sea levels. Drought was not the overriding factor in the demise of Mesoamerican cities, as once held. Cities such as Teotihuacan experienced significant growth during a period of severe drought, and Caracol was already largely abandoned by the time that region of Belize was affected by lack of rain.

The idea that compact and dense urbanism dominated Mesoamerica is also a myth. A form of dispersed urbanism was prevalent within Mesoamerica (and in other parts of the world) that varied from city to city, and those societies that were the most successful were collective, or largely democratic. The PNAS article is a first step in helping clear up misconceptions surrounding the perceived failures of Mesoamerican cities, and spotlights the resiliency of their residents. Gary holds that one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the success of Mesoamerican cities is from its community members, who, by working tirelessly to adapt to a changing environment and react to natural disasters without technology, are models for contemporary communities. “These cities speak to the great potential of human cooperation,” he said. “When people share a goal, they can do amazing things.”

Read more in the University of Houston press release.

July 28. 2023

The minerals, among the first solids that formed in our Solar System, were extracted from the Field Museum’s Aguas Zarcas and Murchison meteorites, and include signatures of the activity of the early young Sun. The young Sun had a profound influence on the evolution of our solar system, and any knowledge gained about it helps us better understand this defining time in natural history. To extract, the team used laser extraction mass spectrometry to analyze helium and neon isotopes with the most sensitive instrument in the world, enabling the team to determine the solar activity 4.6 billion years ago. Part of a long-term program to study the evolution of the activity of the early young Sun, the method was developed by Philipp and colleagues, and the project is currently funded by a current grant through NASA’s Emerging Worlds Program. As a note, Xin Yang received NASA’s prestigious Future Investigators (FINESST) Award for this project, which is a fully funded research assistantship for two years.

In addition:

- Philipp Heck was interviewed by Science News for his thoughts on a new publication in Science Advances on pre-solar stardust found in some of the oldest and least altered samples brought back to Earth by the Japanese (JAXA) mission Hayabusa2. Philipp explained the significance of clasts in understanding the Solar System’s origins. He likened the process of planet formation to kneading bread dough, where the clasts represent bits of unmixed flour that endured unchanged in the final loaf. These clasts offer invaluable insights into the unaltered ingredients that shaped the solar system.

- On July 1, Research Scientist Maria Valdes was quoted in an article in Scientific American about the delivery of water to Earth by comets (“Did Earth’s Water Come from Meteorites?”).

July 28. 2023

Hairworm larvae infest arthropods, like crickets and mantids. Once fully grown, adult worms drive terrestrial hosts to plunge in water, where parasites wriggle out of the cricket’s rear end to find mates for reproduction. However, hairworms are uniquely strange in their genetic make-up; by sequencing the first genomes of the phylum, one freshwater and one marine species, Tauana and colleagues found that they lost a surprising 30% of a set of genes that are expected to be present in all animals—specifically, the genes that are responsible for the development of cilia, tiny hair-like structures at the cellular level that act as sensors, help cells move, and filter microbes and debris. Cilia are critical to most animals on the planet, but horsehair worms appear to survive well without them. How do these parasites navigate their environment when they lack the basic sensory structures that most animals possess? That will require more research. Keiichi Kakui at Hokkaido University in Japan calls the article “a great advance” in understanding the phylogenetic relationships and the evolution of parasitism in nematomorphs and their close relatives. Read more in the press release, and on CNN, at Popular Science, and in NeuroScience News.

July 28. 2023

In this competition, teams compete to record as many plants and animals as possible in a patch of rainforest using non-traditional biodiversity survey methods, like drones, eDNA, and automated species identification tools. Nigel competed as part of Yale University’s Map of Life rapid assessment team, which used above- and below-canopy drones to take plant photographs and record bird and bat calls inside Singapore’s Central Catchment Nature Reserve. On July 24, Nigel learned that the Yale team was one of six to make it into the finals. By the close of the 24 hours Semifinals period, Nigel and the team had gathered a total of 2,199 visual and 292 acoustic samples with expected detections that led to a total of 1,419 species identifications, amounting to 153 unique detected species across plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Finals testing for the six finalists will take place in 2024. The winning team will survey the most biodiversity contained in 100 hectares of tropical rainforest in 24 hours and produce the most impactful real-time insights within 48 hours.

July 28. 2023

The conversation touched on philosophy, sociology, science, climate and more—including Henry David Thoreau’s’ contention that “the simplest and most lumpish fungus” was akin to poetry. To enjoy this thought-provoking dialogue, click here.

July 28. 2023

Recently, the Bill Stanley African Scholars Program brought three professionals from the Iziko South African Museum—Robyn Symons, Zaituna Skosan, and Sibusiso Mtungata—to the Field Museum between May 25 and June 17. During the visit, the Iziko team focused on improving their best practices and procedures for the curation and maintenance of fossil vertebrate collections. Several Field Museum professionals assisted the Iziko team, including Akiko Shinya (Chief Fossil Preparator), William Simpson (Fossil Vertebrates Collections Manager), Paul Mayer (Fossil Invertebrates Collections Manager), Adrienne Stroup (Collections Assistant), Connie Van Beek (Fossil Preparator), and Jim Holstein (Meteoritics and Mineralogy Collections Manager).

Weekends were also busy for the visitors, including introducing the mammal forerunner Lystrosaurus and the End-Permian mass extinction event at the ESCONI (Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois) children’s program, hosted by the College of Dupage. With the help of Brian Nugent (ESCONI) and Scott Galloway (Leader of the Children’s Program) children were presented with Lystrosaurus 3D masks and a coloring sheet, and had the opportunity to speak directly with the Iziko team on their fieldwork and fossil curation experiences. These interactions were captured digitally and will be used to develop two online short courses for the new Iziko South African Museum training portal called PalaeoLink. The portal is run through a collaboration between the University of Cape Town, Geological Sciences Department (Dr. Wendy L. Taylor), and the Iziko South African Museum’s Karoo Palaeontology Division. The broader goal of this initiative is to deepen the Field Museum’s relationships with Iziko and other African museums by establishing a knowledge-sharing program focusing on the curation, decolonization, and maintenance of collections. The PalaeoLink portal will serve local communities and research technicians through sharing of digital data and knowledge between institutions. The team believes that museums can address the colonial legacies of their collections in a positive way by taking part in capacity-building programs that help local communities and researchers in other countries share their own knowledge and regional heritage. The PalaeoLink team would like to thank the Field Museum Science and Scholarship Funding Committee, the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the University of Cape Town, PAST (Palaeontological Scientific Trust), and the DSI-NRF Centre for Excellence in the Palaeosciences (GENUS) for making this program possible.

July 28. 2023

The grant for about $3 million will support continued work on zoonotic diseases and at the interface of wild small mammals and bats, domestic animals, and humans living in and around the Marojejy National Park in northeastern Madagascar, and across a diverse landscape from intact forest, to agroforestry areas, to villages. The principal investigator is Charlie Nunn at Duke University, and this new grant is an extension of a previous grant from NIH/NSF. Association Vahatra in Madagascar, where Steve serves as Scientific Advisor, is responsible for the small mammal work, which starts in October of this year.

July 28. 2023

The essay caps a collection of eight papers by evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers that explore what it is about living fossils that triggers dissatisfaction among scientists, just how routinely the living fossil concept is invoked, and how the concept can play the role of inspiring and guiding progressive empirical and theoretical investigation. Papers consider the remarkable accumulation over the past 150 years of over 800 named living fossils, the priority of living fossils in conservation biology, conflicting rates of evolution in genetic and morphological characters in the same lineage, the relationship of long generation times to slow evolution of body plans, theoretical models for evaluating living fossil status, and whether there is anything special about the present time in pursuing living fossil questions—whether "extinct living fossils" can yield valuable new insights. All the papers can be downloaded at this link.

July 28. 2023

Some have not been seen since Crosby and Bishop described them and are considered “lost species.” The trip, funded with a grant from the Society, was undertaken by FMNH Research Associates Nina Sandlin (FMNH) and Michael Draney (U. of Wisconsin-Green Bay), as well as Marc Milne (U. of Indianapolis). They focused on little-sampled fens and wet meadows, the likely home for these wetland-dependent species. Such habitats are increasingly rare, and some remain protected only due to luck. In 8 days of field work at 11 sites, the team collected 40 samples, containing likely over one thousand spiders. The primary techniques were litter sifting and vacuum extraction using a specially adapted leaf-blower. Scientists from state conservation agencies had provided habitat information and site suggestions, and in one case came out and collected alongside the team. Marc and Mike have identified a large share of the Field Museum’s backlog of Nearctic taxa, and Nina maintains LinEpig, an online gallery of epigyna (female reproductive anatomy used to identify species) of Nearctic erigonines—female erigonines are the only group of spider not included in Spiders of North America: An Identification Manual. Erigonines are too minuscule to allow field ID, so expedition organizer Marc will be examining and identifying the collected material over the coming months, in hopes of turning up one or more of Crosby and Bishop’s lost species.

July 28. 2023

Tin was a vital ingredient in the production of bronze, which was crucial to making decorative and ceremonial items for elites and commoners alike. Despite being located away from centers of powerful social formations, Rooiberg was an “open source” in which metalworking was more dispersed than concentrated. Different communities producing crafts at Rooiberg controlled their destiny and traded and exchanged with others through intricate capillary circulatory systems. The frequency of objects recovered from excavations indicates that these systems involved mostly internal commodities, with limited amounts of exotica from the Indian Ocean trade.This research makes a significant contribution to understanding the regional relationships between large polities and areas with point-resources, casts a critical light elite-centered histories, and highlights the need for closer investigation of interactions and interconnections involving differently organized societies.

July 28. 2023

As such, it is easy to forget that they (and the rest of the Museum's taxidermy mounts) are not just exhibition elements, but catalogued scientific specimens with research value. Curator Emeritus Bruce Patterson unpacks this idea in a new article entitled “The man-eaters of Tsavo and the untapped potential of natural history collections,” in Curator: The Museum Journal. Because these lions have known provenance and chronology, it has been possible to study them with a broad array of investigations. Through numerous studies motivated by their notoriety, these lion specimens have retold their own story, correcting many popular fictions and inaccuracies. For example, despite their incompleteness and imperfections, scientists can infer differences in diet and dominance relationships more than 120 years ago! As Bruce notes in the article, the lions remind us “that the collections of natural history museums hold almost limitless potential to illuminate the world around us and its history.”

July 28. 2023

The Schmidt Ocean Institute live-streamed the ROV-gathered video in real time to the web throughout the cruise (see highlights here). The Institute sent out a press release that was picked up widely, including NPR, The Independent, Smithsonianmag.org, CNN, Mongabay, Science Times, ABC 7 Chicago, and more. The photo, from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, shows an octopus thought to be a new species. Also capturing the public’s attention from the trip was some video of the rare “Gulper eel.” Watch some recorded footage on CNN, and details on this strange species at LiveScience.

July 7. 2023

Madagascar is home to a great diversity of endemic mammals hosting several zoonotic pathogens. Although the African origin of Malagasy mammals has been addressed for a number of flying and terrestrial taxa, the origin of their hosted zoonotic pathogens is currently unknown. Using bats and Leptospira infections as a model system, Steve and colleagues tested whether Malagasy mammal hosts acquired these infections on the island following colonization events, or alternatively brought these bacteria from continental Africa. The team began by describing the genetic diversity of pathogenic Leptospira infecting bats from Mozambique and then tested through analyses of molecular variance (AMOVA) whether the genetic diversity of Leptospira hosted by bats from Mozambique, Madagascar and Comoros is structured by geography or by their host phylogeny. The results revealed a wide diversity of Leptospira lineages shed by bats from Mozambique. AMOVA strongly indicates that the diversity of Leptospira sequences obtained from bats sampled in Mozambique, Madagascar, and Comoros is structured according to bat phylogeny. Presented data show that a number of Leptospira lineages detected in bat congeners from continental Africa and Madagascar are imbedded within monophyletic clades, strongly suggesting that bat colonists have indeed originally crossed the Mozambique Channel while infected with pathogenic Leptospira.

July 7. 2023

In 2006, the 109th Congress designated the third week of June as “National Pollinator Week” to highlight the importance of protecting pollinators and their habitats for the vital role that they play in our ecosystems and food supply. Pollinator Week has since become an annual event, organized by Pollinator Partnership, and is celebrated around the world. This year, the Field Museum had the only registered Pollinator Week event on Pollinator Partnership’s website within the Chicago city limits.

Highlights from the week included:

-  Pollinator-themed activities in the Crown Family Playlab that reached nearly 1,500 visitors.

- Six external partner events, mostly throughout the South Side, showcasing pollinator resources from the N.W. Harris Learning Collection and distributing native plants and Nature Kits.

-  Two “Meet a Scientist” events in the Grainger Science Hub with over 350 attendees.

-  Chicago Public Library Story Time in the Small Treasures Gallery.

-  A Native Gardens Scavenger hunt for over 200 guests, led by Teen Volunteers.

-  An intensive Bioblitz event in the Rice Native Garden, where youth participants including Chicago Green Ambassadors, Field Museum Digital Learning, Women in Science, and Urban Conservation Interns, Teen Volunteers, and middle school STEM Camps, collected specimens and observational data.

The event directly reached 2,181 attendees with programming, distributed 460 Pollinator-themed Nature Kits and 230 native plants to the public (grown from seed harvested from the Rice Native Gardens), and fostered partnerships across and outside the Museum. To see the 2023 Pollinator Week photobook, click here.

July 7. 2023

1)  A May paper in the journal Cretaceous Research by Jingmai, Bass Postdoctoral Fellow Yosef Kiat, and colleagues from Yunnan University, details the discovery of a cluster of feathers preserved in amber from a baby bird that lived 99 million years ago. The specimen—the first definitive fossil evidence of juvenile molting—indicate that this bird’s life history doesn’t match that of modern birds. Today’s birds either hatch naked and helpless (altricial) or feathered and fairly self-sufficient (precocial), but the amber specimen exhibits a “totally bizarre combination of precocial and altricial characteristics,” Jingmai declares in the FMNH press release. All the body feathers were at essentially the same stage in development, meaning all the feathers started growing simultaneously, or nearly so. However, this bird was almost certainly part of a now-extinct group called the Enantiornithines, which Jingmai’s research indicates were highly precocial. The authors hypothesized that the pressures of being a precocial baby bird that had to keep itself warm while undergoing a rapid molt, might have been a factor in the ultimate demise of the Enantiornithines. “When the asteroid hit,” says Jingmai, “global temperatures would have plummeted and resources would have become scarce, so not only would these birds have even higher energy demands to stay warm, but they didn’t have the resources to meet them.”

2) In addition, a brand-new paper in Communications Biology by Jingmai and Yosef examines molting patterns in modern birds to better understand how the process first evolved. Scientists’ knowledge regarding molt in ancient birds is based largely on a single specimen of Microraptor. Jingmai and Yosef surveyed 92 feathered non-avian dinosaur and stem bird fossils and found no additional evidence of molting. They also examined 600+ modern bird skins in the Field Museum Bird Collection, and found evidence of molt more frequently in extant bird species with sequential molts versus those with more rapid simultaneous molts—paralleling the case with fossil specimens The team’s analysis suggests that the evolution of the annual molt of flight feathers evolved with the development of powered flight, as a response to the high dependence of the group on the flight feathers and the aerodynamic ability they impart. This strategy probably improves the ability to maintain high performance of the feathered flight surface in dinosaurs with true powered flight throughout the yearly cycle. The data gleaned from this statistical comparison of extant and extinct collections provides an intriguing hypothesis regarding molting in early bird ancestors with limited flight capabilities.

July 7. 2023

Her co-authors include Negaunee Curator Larry Heaney, Curator Ken Angielczyk, Jon Nations (FMNH/UChicago postdoc) and Dakota Rowsey (former FMNH postdoc, now of Arizona State University Biocollections). The study looks at a lineage of Philippine endemic rodents commonly called the earthworm mice, which come in a variety of shapes and colors, and navigate their environments in different ways. Due to the fact that the group is endemic to the Philippines, and has been evolving to occupy a number of different ecological niches for ~8 million years, scientists consider them a “natural experiment” in how ecology affects the internal structure of their vertebral bones.

July 7. 2023

The ancient Mesopotamian city of Kish (occupied from about 3200 BC through the 7th century AD), held an extraordinary position during the formative periods of human history. Material collected from the site in the joint Field Museum–University of Oxford excavations between 1923 to 1933 yielded one of the Museum’s most significant archaeological collections. In 2004, the Museum launched a reevaluation of its Kish holdings, and then held a symposium in 2008 to highlight new research and insights into the material and to advance understanding of the importance of the site to Mesopotamian archaeology. The event featured a wide array of presentations from international scholars on the artifacts excavated from Kish, including cuneiform texts, animal figurines, human remains, lithics, figural stucco wall decorations, and more. Selected papers from that symposium are now available in this new volume, which you can purchase, or download, here.

July 7. 2023

The weevil Anchylorhynchus trapezicollis is the main pollinator of South American palm Syagrus coronata. Here the weevil is seen on a female flower, touching the receptive parts and leaving pollen grains in the process. Credit: Bruno de Medeiros.

Butterflies, bees, and even bats are celebrated as pollinators: creatures that travel from flower to flower to feed, and in the process, help fertilize the plants by spreading pollen. But some of nature’s most diverse pollinators often go unnoticed, even by scientists: long-snouted beetles called weevils. A new study in the journal Peer Community Journal provides a deep dive into the more than 300 species of weevils, including ones whose entire life cycles are interwoven with a specific plant that they help pollinate.

“Even people who work on pollination don't usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don't usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group,” says Bruno de Medeiros, an assistant curator of insects at Chicago’s Field Museum and the senior author of the study. “There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions.”

There are about 400,000 species of beetles that scientists have identified, making them the largest group of animals in the world. And the largest group of beetles are the weevils. “There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together,” says de Medeiros. The new study, which de Medeiros co-authored with Julien Haran and Gael Kergoat at France’s Université de Montpellier, is a review of hundreds of previously published descriptions of interactions between weevils and plants, to better understand their role as pollinators.

Weevils are sometimes considered pests; they can sometimes be found in pantries eating pasta and grains, and around the turn of the 20th century, boll weevils disrupted the American South’s cotton economy by feeding on cotton buds. However, many species are beneficial to plants, especially as pollinators.

“In this study, we focused on brood-site pollinators-- insects that use the same plants they pollinate as breeding sites for their larvae,” says de Medeiros. “It is a special kind of pollination interaction because it is usually associated with high specialization: because the insects spend their whole life cycle in the plant, they often only pollinate that plant. And because the plants have very reliable pollinators, they mostly use those pollinators.”

Brood-site pollination is a little like a more extreme version of the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, which is the only plant that Monarch caterpillars eat and the site where the butterflies lay their eggs. But brood-site pollinators, unlike Monarchs, take the relationship a step further: adult Monarchs feed on the nectar of many different flowers, but brood-site pollinators, including many species of weevils, rely only on their one plant partner as a source of food and a site for egg-laying.

“This kind of pollination interaction is generally thought to be rare or unusual,” says de Medeiros. “In this study, we show that there are hundreds of weevil species and plants for which this has been documented already, and many, many more yet to be discovered.”

These closely-linked relationships mean that the plants and weevils need each other to flourish. “Oil palm, which is used to make peanut butter and Nutella, was not a viable industry until someone figured out that the weevils found with them were their pollinators,” says de Medeiros. “And because people had an incorrect preconception that weevils were not pollinators, it took much, much longer than it could have taken.”

He says that these sorts of misconceptions are one of the motivations for the new study. “We are highlighting a group of insects that most people want to see killed, and we're showing that they can actually be pretty important for maintaining ecosystems and products that we care about,” he says. “We hope that by summarizing what we know and providing some pointers on what we should be paying attention to, we can help other researchers and the public to better appreciate the role of weevils as pollinators, especially in the tropics."

Originally published at fieldmuseum.org on May 25. 2023

It was made possible by an international team across Museum departments and outside collaborators, including the NIRC's postdoctoral research scientist Matteo Fabbri. To hear more about what makes Spinosaurus unique to other dinosaurs, you can see Matteo discussing this fossil on the Field Museum's Instagram here.

The new cast in Stanley has been featured in national and international news since its installation—read more from coverage including Associated Press, Reuters, Chicago Tribune, WBEZ, and Fox News Chicago.

Amanda and R.J. were inspired to create this podcast during a recent tour of the Birds Collection and labs by John. At present, the focus is on individual bird species and Museum specimens, but in future episodes, the content will expand to include Field Museum staff and students in Birds. Here’s the link the podcast, and its Instagram can be accessed by clicking here.

Diego gave a presentation on analysis and understanding of incongruence in cichlid phylogenomics. Caleb and Diego were also co-authors on several presentations by colleagues, including longtime collaborator Arturo Angulo Sibaja (and former Visiting Scholarship recipient) from Costa Rica, who gave a presentation on their collaborative work studying fishes in Nicaragua (see photo). Additionally, Carlos Garcia Alzate, soon to visit the Museum from Colombia with support from the Science and Scholarship Funding Committee, presented on the systematics of a widespread group of tetras from Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. This was the first time back for this meeting since the start of the pandemic, and the FMNH Fish-heads were delighted to re-connect with colleagues and collaborators for ongoing and exciting new research projects.

The show, entitled Parliament of Plants II, runs from May through October, and features photographs, prints, paintings, sculptures, and multimedia exhibits by more than10 artists from around the world that address connections between human and non-human beings. One of the artists in the exhibition is German photographer Thomas Struth, who contributed artwork from Paradise, a series of large-scale photographs he took of forests around the world. As part of a publication accompanying the exhibition, the curators prepared a poster featuring one of Struth’s photographs and an essay by Nigel about Struth, which was originally published in the magazine Nautilus in 2014 and is available online here.

They sequenced “Ultra-conserved Elements” (UCEs) from 177 samples of seven bird species associated with white-sand ecosystems that have overlapping ranges. The DNA analysis revealed that genetic structure patterns varied among species, with the Amazon River the only barrier shared among them.

The main conclusions were that white-sand ecosystem species responded in concert to environmental and landscape changes that occurred in the relatively recent past. Population expansions were likely driven by the genesis of new white-sand patches and a return to wetter conditions after glacial periods. Pleistocene climatic cycles affected the distribution and dynamics of open vegetation habitats in Amazonia, especially in the Northern region, driving genetic diversity and demographic patterns of its associated biota.

Other recipients were from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, Loyola University, and Lincoln Park Zoo, and all projects seek to restore, protect and conserve biodiversity in the Chicago region and around the world. Each Biota Award recipient’s institution will receive $300,000 over three years to develop and deliver on-the-ground solutions to biodiversity challenges. The Biota Award program is a project of Walder Foundation’s Environmental Sustainability program, which promotes the long-term sustainability of the natural environment by addressing socio-environmental challenges to climate, water, food and health.

The first paper is "Macroecological diversification of ants is linked to angiosperm evolution" in Evolution Letters and can be found in its entirety here. It was written by Matt Nelsen, NIRC Curator Rick Ree, and others by bringing together fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and plants have been evolving together over the past 60 million years. Ants and flowering plants both originated around 140 million years ago, eventually became more prevalent, and spread to new habitats. The team wanted to find evidence for links between the two groups’ evolutionary paths. The resulting study found, according to Nelsen, that "plants play [an important role] in shaping ecosystems. Shifts in plant communities—such as those we are seeing as a consequence of historic and modern climate change—can cascade and impact the animals and other organisms relying on these plants." The work was made possible with support from the Grainger Bioinformatics Center and the Negaunee Foundation. The study got wide news coverage, including WTTW, MSN, Forbes Mexico, National Geographic Hungary, National Geographic Indonesia, and more.

The second paper is "Six decades of museum collections reveal disruption of native ant assemblages by introduced species" and appears here in Current Biology. Written by Nelsen and colleagues from a variety of institutions across the US, the study looks at how invasive ant species have and are eroding litter-ant diversity in Florida by using museum collections and surveys of these ants. The study highlights the importance of museum collections for understanding species diversity, as they serve as proof for the presence of a species at a particular location and time. Nelsen states, "These collections provide snapshots in time that enable us to better understand how abundance, diversity and distributional ranges have changed over time."

Siggers and Lumbsch worked with others on an effort to quantify the global holdings of the most important natural history museums, especially in regard to investigating issues such as climate and environmental change. This study also helps prioritize the collection of new material to address thematic and geographical gaps in the collections. The article in Science can be found here as well as at this link for the news coverage of the study in The New York Times.

The paper details a new fossil that the study describes as a new species of ancient reptile-like mammal ancestor, Melanedaphodon hovaneci, which had teeth similar to living lizards like blue-tongued skinks, who devour everything from fruits and vegetation to insects.

Researchers have long thought that large animals did not start eating vegetation until the early Permian period, but the discovery of this new fossil may push this dietary revolution back millions of years. The study was also covered in the Smithsonian.

• “SUE the T. rex: The Science & Story of the World's Most Powerful Predator” (Associate Curator Jingmai O’Connor)

•  “Weird Science: Blurring the Line between Science Fiction and Fact” (postdoc Maria Valdez and Research Scientist Matt Nelsen)

•  “Dinosaur Fight Night” (O'Connor)

•  “SciComm of the Mesozoic: Bringing the Age of the Dinosaurs to Life in Books, Comics, and Film” (O'Connor and Assistant Curator Fabiany Herrera) 

Every panel was packed with questions right up to the last minute. You can see more on Instagram here.

Maria Valdes, a research scientist at the Field Museum's Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies and the University of Chicago, estimates that of the roughly 45,000 meteorites retrieved from Antarctica over the past century, only about a hundred or so are this size or larger. “Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable,” says Valdes, “but of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting.”

Valdes was one of four scientists on the mission, led by Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (FNRS-ULB); the research team was rounded out by Maria Schönbächler (ETH-Zurich) and Ryoga Maeda (VUB-ULB). The researchers were the first to explore potential new meteorite sites mapped using satellite imagery by Veronica Tollenaar, a thesis student in glaciology at the ULB.

The meteorites recovered by the team will be analyzed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences; meanwhile, sediment potentially containing tiny micrometeorites was divided among the researchers for study at their institutions.

The team was guided by Manu Poudelet of the International Polar Guide Association and assisted by Alain Hubert. They were supported in part by the Belgian Science Policy. Valdes’s work is supported by the Field Museum’s Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, the TAWANI Foundation, and the Meeker family.

Media coverage on the expedition includes reports on Science Magazine, CNN, NPR, Space.com, Forbes, and several international media outlets including Swissinfo, Tagesspiegel, VRT, Gizmodo Japan – and Saturday Night Live!

A group with the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History tested an instrument made by Thermo Fisher Scientific on a piece of a Martian meteorite nicknamed ‘Black Beauty’ and were able to quickly and precisely date it by probing it with a tiny laser beam—a significant improvement over past techniques, which involved far more work and destroyed parts of the sample. The meteorite was donated to the Field Museum's Robert A. Pritzker Center by private meteorite collector Jay Piatek.

“We are very excited by this demonstration study, as we think that we will be able to employ the same approach to date rocks that will be returned by multiple space missions in the future,” said Nicolas Dauphas, the Louis Block Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, Honorary Research Associate at the Field Museum, and first author on a study laying out the results. “The next decade is going to be mind-blowing in terms of planetary exploration.”

Read the press release and paper in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.