Field Museum

Welcome to the jungle: newly-discovered snake named after Slash from Guns N’ Roses

Slash, aka Saul Hudson, is probably best known as the guitarist from Guns N’ Roses. But there’s more to Slash than his music.
The Field Museum

Field Museum Establishes Endowed Legal Fellowship Honoring Cultural Heritage Law Pioneer Dr. Patty Gerstenblith

The Field Museum today announced the creation of the Patty Gerstenblith Legal Fellowship in Art, Museum, and Cultural Heritage Law, a new endowed, two-year fellowship honoring Dr. Patty Gerstenblith’s ...
The Field Museum

Societies around the world have buried their dead at home. Anthropologists want to understand why the practice started, and why it has largely disappeared.

There are countless different cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing that they all have in common is that no matter what, death is a part of everybody’s life.
The Field Museum

This pinecone-looking animal is the world’s most-trafficked mammal. New analysis of its DNA and a rebuilt family tree could help save it from poaching.

Imagine an anteater with a long, thick tail, huge, curling claws, and an armored body covered by overlapping, pinecone-like scales. What you get is a pangolin, a mid-sized mammal found only in Africa ...
The Field Museum

New species of dinosaur, a cousin of Velociraptor, probably glided on four “wings” and hunted early birds

A fossil bed in northwestern China is littered with the remains of hundreds of prehistoric birds—including some whose broken bones were crushed into pellets, similar to those coughed up by modern owls ...
The Field Museum

This newly-discovered blue octopus from the Galápagos Islands could curl up in the palm of your hand

The Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador are home to more than a thousand plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth— things like marine iguanas and giant tortoises. In a new paper in ...
The Field Museum

How moss helped solve a grave-robbing mystery

In 2009, a scandal was exposed at a cemetery just outside of Chicago. Workers at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, were accused of exhuming old graves, dumping the remains elsewhere on the ...
The Field Museum

This ancient plant-eater had a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth

In a dry riverbed in Brazil, in a dense forest near the Amazon, a team of paleontologists found a fossilized jawbone from an ancient animal. Over the course of their fieldwork, they found eight ...
The Field Museum

Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies

The “tyrant digger’s” tough teeth—including ones on the roof its mouth—reveal the evolutionary history of plant-eating Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, ...
The Field Museum

The earliest known bird had complex tongue bones and fleshy “teeth” on the roof of its mouth—which might have helped it snag the food it needed for flight

Flying is really hard work. Compared to walking, swimming, or running, flying is the form of movement that takes the most energy and requires the most calories. That means that birds have had to ...
The Field Museum

UV light and CT scans helped scientists unlock hidden details in a perfectly-preserved fossil Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx is the fossil that proved Darwin right. It’s the oldest known fossil bird, and it helps show that all birds— including the ones alive today— are dinosaurs. And while the first ...
The Field Museum

Pokémon Fossil Museum Special Exhibition to Make North American Debut at Chicago's Field Museum

CHICAGO – May 14, 2025 – Pokémon Fossil Museum, the Japanese special exhibition that compares fossil Pokémon from the popular Pokémon video game series with ancient life forms found in real-world ...