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Born of the 1893 world’s fair
The museum grew out of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, and the State of Illinois incorporated it on 16 September that year. Edward Ayer persuaded the merchant Marshall Field to fund it. First called the Columbian Museum of Chicago, it took the name Field Museum of Natural History in 1905.


A new home by the lake
In 1921 the museum moved from Jackson Park to its present building near downtown, a Classical Revival design by Daniel Burnham and Pierce Anderson. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and stands on the Museum Campus beside the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium.
Twenty-four million objects
Today the collections hold more than 24 million specimens and objects. SUE, the Tyrannosaurus rex unveiled on 17 May 2000, now stands in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, the galleries that follow life on Earth over four billion years.



