Visitors to the Field Museum early next year will be in for a shock: For the first time in almost two decades, Sue, the museum’s star attraction and the largest, most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, will not be on display in the museum’s central hallway.
Beginning with her dismantling in February, the apex predator and apex museum specimen is being kicked upstairs in favor of a dinosaur much bigger and much more recently discovered — the world’s largest, in fact, the Patagotitan mayorum, a plant eater unearthed in South America in 2014.
“We have this tremendous hall that sort of dwarfs everything, even Sue,” said Peter Makovicky, the museum’s associate curator of dinosaurs. “You pretty much have two options: You either get a blue whale or you get the biggest dinosaur in the world.”
The Sue skeleton will move upstairs to a new exhibit being constructed especially for her, the museum will announce Wednesday, and Stanley Field Hall will host a cast of the titanosaur that will stretch 122 feet from head to toe, more than three times Sue’s length and almost 7 times her bulk, and stand two stories tall.
Because it is a cast — the second full skeleton to be displayed in the world, following one that went up last year at New York’s American Museum of Natural History — visitors will be able to walk under it, to touch it, to reach way up and caress the animal maybe just above the knee.
The introduction of a new potential museum star, and the recasting of the current one, are occurring to mark the 125th anniversary of the museum in 2018. Paying for it is a $16.5 million gift from Chicago billionaire Kenneth Griffin, which the Field calls “one of the largest private contributions ever to a Chicago museum,” designed to help emphasize the museum’s status as a first-rate dinosaur destination.
But moving Sue could jolt a public that has grown accustomed to that menacing face. Chicagoans aren’t always so keen on alterations to the norm. Size is sexy, but so is ferocity. Sue, as a top carnivore, has always had a special magnetism. But museums are not immune to the challenge of the theme park, where each year demands a new roller coaster.
“It’s a radical change that people will initially have a strong reaction to, and I think that’s good,” said Jaap Hoogstraten, the museum’s director of exhibits. He emphasized that Stanley Field Hall has had a variety of personas through the years: There’s been a fountain there, there’ve been rows of animal specimens in wood-and-glass cases, there was, immediately before Sue, the 75-foot brachiosaur skeleton cast, a smaller titanosaur and one discovered many decades earlier, that is now out on the museum’s northwest terrace.
The brachiosaur “got knocked out of Stanley Field Hall by Sue,” said William Simpson, a Field paleontologist and its head of collections.
“I think that’s a smart thing they’re going to do,” said Pete Larson, who was part of the group of fossil hunters that originally discovered Sue, a 90-percent complete fossil, in 1990 in the Black Hills of South Dakota. “Moving her to a smaller hall will really emphasize her size. She’s a huge dinosaur, but because the room is so large she’s kind of dwarfed in it. I also think this will give them a better venue to tell her story in more detail.”
Plus, time and science march on, said Larson, president of the Black Hills Geological Research Institute in Hill City, S.D., and Sue’s continuing celebrity status can be used to boost visitorship to her new home, the “Evolving Planet” exhibit that tells the story of life on Earth and is already the museum’s most popular permanent exhibition.
The Patagotitan “is a new discovery and Sue’s been there for some time,” Larson said. “People are going to wonder where Sue is and they’re going to go looking for her.”
The taxidermied fighting elephants will remain in the hall and so will the Native American totem poles from the Pacific Northwest as large, iconic objects symbolic of what else is to be discovered in the exhibition spaces that surround the great hall. But having the Patagotitan there will say “dinosaur,” Field officials hope, in even bolder type than Sue has done.
And more is to come as the year goes on and a big temporary exhibit on Antarctic dinosaurs opens in June, President and CEO Richard Lariviere hinted: “We’ll have the pterodactyl-like critter that will have a 30-foot wingspan hanging from the ceiling” in Stanley Field Hall, he said.
But that’s getting ahead of things.
“(The museum) is a dynamic place,” said Lariviere. “One of our biggest challenges is that the public doesn’t understand that the science and therefore the information we convey is changing on an almost hourly basis here. I talk to people all the time who think that since they’ve been to the Field Museum 10 years ago they’ve seen it.
“By transforming the central space of the museum we hope to convey that exact message,” he said.
Or, as Makovicky put it, “We’re not your dad’s Field Museum or certainly not your grandfather’s Field Museum.”
Visitors will find Sue, beginning in early 2019, if all goes as expected, in the current 3-D theater space that is nestled amid, but separate from, the “Evolving Planet” exhibit in the northeast corner of the Field’s second floor.
That room will be reconfigured as a stop on the “Evolving Planet” pathway with an environment specially designed for Sue, which debuted at the Field in 2000. And the great T. rex skeleton itself, which the Field bought at auction for $8.36 million in 1997 after an intense bidding war, will undergo some corrections to reflect newer science.
“The key thing is we’re adding to its value,” Makovicky said. “There’ll be new science, new digital. The price (to see it) doesn’t change. The only difference is you’ve got to walk up a couple of flights to see it. We think because we’re putting it in the context of the paleontolgy exhibit and we’re providing new content, it should make everyone happy.”
Those fixes? What is currently on display as the “wishbone” is actually part of the gastralia, or belly ribs. New T. rex research has revealed that the actual wishbone is in the museum’s collection but not on display, “originally identified as a possible last rib,” Makovicky said.
The restoration of that damaged, asymetrical bone — just like wishbones since identified in three T. rex skeletons — will change the positioning of Sue’s arms.
“It’s not going to change the fact that the arms will never reach the mouth,” Makovicky said. “But they will come closer to the ground so they’re not going to stick out sideways like little useless chicken wings as much as they do now.”
More changes will necessitate significant reworking of the metal armature that holds the bones in place. “The highly bent right leg is going to be unbent,” he said. “The ribs are going to be a little more back-swept. Right now they stick straight out, but we think they should be more angled back.”
And perhaps the most noticeable change will be that Sue, as she gets to an age even more advanced than 67 million years, will show signs of a pot belly. Her gastralia — a set of sort of belly ribs currently displayed on their own, in a case — will join the mount for the first time based on new understanding of how they fit in the skeleton.
“She’s going to be this big, heavy, deep-bodied animal that she always was, but people didn’t realize it,” Simpson said. “It’s like a ratchet. You get ever closer to the truth.” With the gastralia, “we didn’t quite know how it went together. … And we didn’t want to be wrong, because we didn’t know if we would get to remount it or not.”
It’ll all be done, to the extent possible, in public, with web updates and even viewing windows into the spaces as the skeleton is unmounted and the new space is under construction, officials said.
“We always start with our visitors, asking the public what they want,” said Hoogstraten. “One thing we know is they want to see her in her environment, see Sue in context. She looks beautiful in Stanley Field Hall as an object. In her new home she will be in context, with animals who lived with her, the flora and fauna, through immersion, through digital technology.”
While that space will take an estimated year to develop, the Patagotitan cast is expected to go up in just a month. Exhibit specialists are still figuring out how, exactly, the display will work, but they are thinking the animal’s feet will be on some sort of land form.
Nearby will be some actual Patagotitan bones, on loan from Argentina for two years, including an 8-foot-long thigh bone.
The animal’s head, 28 feet high but relatively tiny, will put visitors on the second-floor west walkway face to face with it. Its tail will be suspended over dining tables at the Field Bistro restaurant.
The Patagotitan at the American Museum is good, said Lariviere, the Field president: “They’ve done a superb job of highlighting its size by having its tail sticking out one end of the room and its head out of the other.”
But it’ll be better displayed in the Field’s space, he said. “Stanley Field Hall was almost built for this kind of thing.”
Said Simpson, “I think people will be amazed at how big dinosaurs got. They thought dinosaurs were big, but this is so much bigger.”
Field staffers said they are excited about the change. “We constantly battle this image,” Makovicky said, “that we’re sort of a dusty old place stuffed with animal hides, and we have to constantly innovate and stay ahead of the curve. Having this anniversary come up and undertaking these visceral changes that the visitor will recognize immediately will help with that.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @stevenkjohnson
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