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An Apollonaut travel guide
The place behind the detail.
A world’s fair, a Classical Revival building and more than 24 million specimens offer several ways into the story of the Field Museum.
On this page
A landmark on the lakefront
Designed by Daniel Burnham and Pierce Anderson and completed in 1921, the museum’s Classical Revival building stands on the Museum Campus near downtown Chicago.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 5 September 1975.
The collections
The museum’s collections hold more than 24 million specimens and objects, from fossils and animals to cultural objects from around the world.
Among the best known are SUE the Tyrannosaurus rex, the Tsavo lions and the mummies of Inside Ancient Egypt.
A change of names
The museum opened as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and became the Field Museum of Natural History in 1905, after Marshall Field, who funded it.
This history belongs to the museum and the people who built and care for its collections. The History page offers a longer introduction, and the timeline gives a short route through selected milestones.
Read at the source
Sources & further reading
Links lead to the original publishers.
