Chicago’s Field Museum has assembled an impressive (and imposing!) collection of fossils, emphasizing the incredible scale of prehistory. Among the most coveted in the collection are the largest creatures to ever walk, fly and feast on other dinosaurs!
SUE’s incredible skeleton is bathed in light at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
This week is Illinois Fossil Week on Natural Curios. Over the next few days, you’ll meet one of the strangest creatures to ever evolve, giant, shaggy elephant-like animals that once stomped across the state and inspired Thomas Jefferson, and some of the largest fossils in the world that currently reside at Chicago’s Field Museum.
For the Field Museum’s 125th anniversary this past year, the museum’s Stanley Field Hall was revitalized, once again, with the help of some of the largest creatures in the history of life on earth. This main foyer, a grand neoclassical hall on par with many of the immense exhibition halls from Chicago’s World Fair of 1893, is the perfect place to display these incredibly large specimens for the world to see. Towards one end of the hall are two enormous totem poles, seemingly reaching for the hall’s windowed ceiling and blue sky beyond. Close by, two bull elephants, posed by the pioneer taxidermist Carl Akeley all the way back in 1909, appear to be jostling each other for the prime position atop the display’s podium. These two displays, however, are somehow dwarfed by the newest additions to the hall.
Carl Akeley’s Fighting African Elephants.
Gone from the main hall is SUE, the world’s largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton discovered (more on her, or it, later). In its spot is the only fossil capable of making the world-famous T. rex skeleton look tiny in comparison. Maximo, the Patagotitan mayorum skeleton cast, is 122 feet long and 28 feet tall, weighing in at over 70 tons when alive. That’s almost as much as 12 of the fighting elephants off to Maximo’s side! From the tip of the tail all the way to the animal’s nose, situated so the dinosaur is looking eye-to-eye with guests on the hall’s second level, the creature’s length eclipses SUE’s length by some 80 feet!
Hi There! The iconic giant dinosaur’s head greets visitor on the museum’s second floor.
Patagotitan mayorum is considered to be the biggest dinosaur ever, making it also the largest terrestrial animal to ever walk on earth. Discovered in Argentina in 2012, the gargantuan sauropod belonged to the largest group of dinosaurs in history, the aptly named titanosaurs. It is not known how these behemoths grew so big, but it is worth noting that their evolutionary growth spurt coincides with the emergence of flowering plants in the Cretaceous Period for the lumbering vegetarians to dine upon.
Maximo even makes the largest living land animals look tiny by comparison!
Above the staggering cast of the titanosaur, the largest animal to walk, soars the largest animal to ever fly, Quetzalcoatlus northropi. Named after the Aztecs’ feathered serpent god, the pterosaur is just as grand: when standing it was as tall as a giraffe! The Field Museum has two life-size replicas, one of which is soaring over Stanley Field Hall, displaying every inch of its 33-foot wingspan. Quetzalcoatlus was part of an unusual group of jumbo-pterosaurs that took to the sky during the Late Cretaceous Period. The immense size of these pterosaurs inhibited them from rapidly flapping their wings once airborne, which forced them to glide on hot air currents. Once airborne, the titans of the sky could fly for almost 10,000 miles (at speeds up to 80 mph) nonstop according to some pterosaur scientists!
Quetzalcoatlus sported a wingspan as wide as some early airplanes!
But propelling such a large body into the air was no small task. The animal probably jumped off of all four limbs, like some bats do. Although huge, its bones were hollow, making the skeleton a relatively lightweight 550ish pounds (still by far and away the heaviest animal to ever fly). However, Quetzalcoatlus’ fossils point to the animal being just as comfortable on land, where it could hunt smaller animals in a similar manner to how storks hunt today. The animal greedily gobbled up baby dinosaurs with its 6-foot long jaws. Its remarkably long neck allowed its mouth to reach prey quickly, thus maximizing the element of surprise on unsuspecting prey.
Quetzalcoatlus was still a behemoth while on the ground, as evidenced by how it towers over me.
Quetzalcoatlus is not the only thing flying through Stanley Field Hall. Two imposing Pteranodon models, with 18-foot wingspans each, hang over head as one mounts the stairs toward the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet exhibit. The giant, toothless (similar to Quetzalcoatlus) monsters would have been a common site soaring through the Late Cretaceous skies in the western United States. A third species suspended above the hall is Rhamphorhynchus, the smallest and oldest of the bunch. But these little guys sported mouths full of razor-sharp teeth to snare fish in the Late Jurassic Period (some 160 million years ago). The hawk-size pterosaur was discovered in 1825 in Germany, relatively early on in paleontology’s history. In all, nine of the toothy, pint-sized terrors are on display in Stanley Field Hall.
Upon following the lead of the soaring pterosaurs, you will arrive at the aforementioned Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet exhibit halls, where you can trace evolution throughout the 4 billion years of earth’s history with the help of some stunning fossils. If you are still clamoring for size, these halls have you covered. The fearsome armored head of the first huge super-predator, Dunkleosteus, greets you around one corner. A mammoth, 72-foot Apatosaurus excelsus skeleton, just about the biggest skeleton one would see outside of Maximo, takes center stage in this main dinosaur hall. Finally, one of my favorite skeletons in the entire museum is the 12-foot tall skeleton of the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus). The monster bear’s long legs made it capable of running over 40 mph…at 1,500 pounds! Its short face was anchored by strong, vise-like jaw muscles that made it the apex predator in an ecosystem with saber-tooth cats, giant wolves and lions.
The giant short-faced bear roamed the western United States during the last ice age.
But the star of the Field’s sublime paleontology collection still has to be SUE, possibly the most spectacular fossil ever discovered. After relinquishing her old stomping grounds to Maximo, the tyrannosaur actually upgraded to a shiny new penthouse-like hall just off of the dinosaur hall. The individual space offers the museum a better opportunity for telling SUE’s story, from its discovery by Sue Hendrickson in 1990, to the groundbreaking science its fossils continue to provide today.
SUE gets its rightful spot in the spotlight.
Most people are confused about why SUE is referred to as ‘it’ since Sue is a female name, after all. In reality, the 65 million years that have elapsed since SUE was buried in sediment make it is impossible to determine the animal’s sex. The creature simply takes its nickname from its discoverer, Sue Hendrickson.
One of my favorite paintings I’ve done stars the world-famous T. rex.
The new dedicated space also allows the skeleton to look bigger…much bigger. You feel every inch of its 40 feet and see every one of its banana-sized teeth. Out ahead of the spectacular skeleton, which is 90% complete, is the tyrannosaur’s skull. Upon closer inspection, the giant cranium looks unbelievably heavy and slightly deformed due to the eons it spent buried in the ground. The exhibit also tells the story of the environment SUE lived in, as well as the animals on the menu (including its famous foe, Triceratops). SUE needed its own space to truly tell its story and continue to rightfully stir our collective imagination.
SUE’s actual skull, though slightly deformed by the fossilization process, still fuels nightmares thanks to that fearsome maw.
The Field Museum is one of the preeminent paleontology institutions in the world, and its latest commitment to displaying these ‘giants’ only doubles-down on the museum’s storied journey over the past 125 years. In 1894, Chicago needed a museum to house all of the specimens procured during the Columbian World Fair of 1893, and The Field Museum emerged. Some of earliest specimens were the giant trunk from a California redwood tree and the large skeleton of a mastodon. Over the next century and change, the museum has continued to collect and emphasize specimens of both great size and great scientific value to the delight of scientists and visitors alike.
Stanley Field Hall offers the perfect habitat for giants at Chicago’s Field Museum!
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All art and photography by Jack Tamisiea.
Sources:
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/meet-sues-new-neighbors-hall-dinosaurs
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/meet-pterosaur-flock
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/absurd-creature-of-the-week-quetz/
https://phys.org/news/2017-08-patagotitan-mayorum-biggest-dinosaur.html
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/about/history
https://www.chicagotribune.com/data/ct-maximo-dinosaur-field-museum-20180606-htmlstory.html
