Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Research trip. Wanna help?

We're planning a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago to celebrate Art's eighth birthday. He's never seen the Field Museum, and their exhibit "Evolving Planet" looks excellent. We've added a ChipIn widget to the blog to help pay for the trip. Art will definitely blog about the experience, and I'll take a ton of pictures.

Thanks to everyone who reads the blog and supports Art's work. He lives for this stuff!

-The Mom

The Field Museum: Evolving Planet


14 comments:

  1. He's going to love the Field Museum, particularly Evolving Planet. They have one of the most fantastic Cambrian and Paleozoic sections I've seen of any museum. The virtual sea display is truly mesmerizing. Good luck fundraising!

    (In the interest of full disclosure: I do volunteer at Field, but loved it years before I moved to Chicago.)

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  2. I went to the Field Museum for the first time this summer--I wish I would have started going at 8...I'm 37. :) I loved it so much, and you will, too.

    I will contribute to the cause soon. I'm learning so much from this blog. I used to be closed off to science, because I wasn't prepared for what the answers that it provides might mean. Now, I embrace it, and this resource is a treasure and an inspiration.

    Thanks to you, Art, and thanks to The Mom!

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  3. You wanna name the entire adventure?

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  4. ... just how attached are y'all to "Art"?

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  5. Oh, I see. You wanna pony up the cash to rename the child, like, "Chico's Bail Bonds" or something like that? Sure, why not.

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  6. ... that's actually what I had in mind ...

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  7. The Mom: The evolving planet exhibit will definitely be worth the trip! But I think you should email the link for Art's blog to the head curator and see if you can get a behind-the-scenes tour. Most of what a museum has in its collection is not on display at any given time, and the rows upon rows of specimens (fossils and things in jars!) are mind-blowing. Definitely my favorite part of the museum, which I got to see as an undergrad.

    As long as you're in Chicago, don't forget the Shedd Aquarium, as well. Lots of displays of fish and invertebrates. It would be a great learning experience to take a look at all the extant species and how they remained similar or have changed from the ones that lived in the Paleozoic. And if I remember right you get to pet starfish and sea urchins!

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  8. Hi Heidi,

    We're hoping to go behind the scenes a bit, but we're not sure we can secure that kind of red carpet treatment. Art was somewhat disappointed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History earlier this year when he found that many of the specimens he was dying to see (Pikaia in particular, as I recall) had been removed from the exhibits. So thanks for the advice. It would be a bummer if we travelled all the way to Chicago and half the Evolving Planet exhibit was closed down or empty. Which would be just my luck.

    Art's love of marine invertebrates began when he was a preschooler, and we visited Shedd Aquarium when he was (I think) four. It's an amazing place. He was particularly interested in the moon jellies and that sort of thing. He loves an aquatic blob.

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  9. There is a special jellies exhibit at the Shedd right now - very cool.
    Evolving Planet is my favorite museum exhibit anywhere. We've a membership at the Field and at every visit we make time for it. (Seems very unlikely that any part of the exhibit would close so I'd not worry about that.)

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  10. I wrote ahead on yr behalf. Haven't heard back yet, but ...

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  11. Am I the only one noticing the sasquatch walking around on the sea floor there?

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  12. Last year we travelled from our home in England for a holiday in Kentucky, where we had lived many years ago. Passing through the airport in Chicago I was bowled over by the dinosaurs on the concourses and wished that we had time to visit the Field Museum. Maybe another time.

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  13. I'm so glad I stumbled on this blog. I'm happy to pitch in on what I hope proves to be a great trip. The CG animation of the Burgess fauna is really fantastic as you enter Evolving Planet.

    If you ever get out to the new Museum of Natural History of Utah, let us know since we do fossil prep in the lab.

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