A Night At The Museum

Last Friday we spent the evening at the Field Museum of Natural History here in Chicago for their annual Members Night. It was our first attendance to one of these things and it was a great, great event. It is almost like the museum's open house, where the members not only get to see all the exhibits on display, but also get to go behind the scenes into areas that are not opened to visitors. We also get to talk to many of the staff and researchers doing various work at the museum, often in their own laboratories or offices. So that made it quite worthwhile.

Anyway, here is a photo essay of the evening.

This is the museum as we walk out of the parking ramp at the museum campus.


The museum was quite packed, since it was a Friday night. They had a cash bar right in the middle of the museum, and the food establishements were also open.


We couldn't go into their Pirates special exhibits since they have distributed already all the time slots for it, but we did managed to go do their Aztec exhibits. Sorry, no pictures for that since photos were prohibited.

We then walked around look at some of the areas that we seldom get to see during our earlier visits. One of them was the North American area that showed the natural habitat of N. America, and the native american lives before the arrivals of the Europeans.






We then walked into the bowels of the museum, which is the lower level that isn't opened to the public. This is known as the "CRC", which is the collections resource center.


The area that was most fascinating to us was the oversize anthropology collections storage room. This area stores large anthropological items that, I presume, get rotated to be on display. It's too bad that we couldn't get to see a lot more of the room beyond just the front.

This is one of the sculpture found in the room.


These HUGE jars were excavated at Pompei and were though to be storage jars for olive oil. They are really quite big, as tall as an average person.


More impressive sculpture. These and the previous one are in bronze.


Nice kitty....


A look at the areas that we couldn't go into in the oversize area storage room. There were several bowls and other artifacts that we could only see from a distance.


There were also a few Egyptian hieroglyphs carved on stones. We didn't get a chance to ask anyone there about them because it was very crowded and the staff there were quite engaged with the visitors.



Leaving the underbelly of the Field Museum, we then went upstairs to the 3rd and 4th floors, which again are typically inaccessible to the public. We essentially got to see the labs and offices where the staff and researchers work. We spent quite a bit of time in the anthropological area and got to talk to a couple of anthropologists about human evolution. There were replicas of the skulls and bones of Australopithecus Africanus, Homo Erectus, and Homo Sapiens. We would have stayed longer but our time for the Aztec tour was about to start, so we had to scoot out of there in a hurry. These are the view of the hallway in these upper floors.



It was a very pleasant evening spent at the museum. This event alone was worth the membership. Since it was such a gorgeous evening, we drove a short distance to the Adler Planetarium and parked there to get a view of the Chicago skyline at night. I never tire looking at this. It is a gorgeous city where I live.


Zz.