President's Message

Welcome to The Field Museum’s website!

The Field Museum is much more than a place to see exhibitions – it is also a world-renowned research institution.  The Field Museum has global, active research programs in anthropology, botany, geology and zoology; and we support active conservation programs throughout the world.  Our collections (nearly 25 million specimens) document the history of life and provide important clues about how different organisms adapted to environmental challenges.  In the coming years we will use these clues to help develop practical responses to modern day issues such as global warming, deforestation, and diminishing natural resources.

This website, unveiled in March 2011, is a new digital “face” for The Field Museum.  Two years in the making, this website allows us to share with you an ever-expanding view of all of The Field Museum’s activities.  Activities like hunting for meteorites; exploring the Pacific floor; unearthing dinosaurs in Antarctica; tracking emerging African wildlife diseases; and cataloguing new species in unexplored Peruvian highlands.  These were just a handful of the many research programs conducted in 2010 by Field Museum staff.

On this site you will also be able to learn about our exhibitions, explore rarely seen collections, chat with curators, plan custom trips, watch videos about our behind the scenes work, and share ideas with people around the world.

I hope you enjoy this website; and I also want to invite you to visit us at the Museum so that you can personally explore real artifacts and real stories about the natural world.  Our exhibition topics range from the latest advances in genetics, to the evolution of life from its earliest forms, to the science of climate change.  For updated information about our exhibitions (permanent and temporary), please refer to our dedicated webpage here.

And finally, I want to thank you – your support and interest are what make all of these programs possible.


                                                            John W. McCarter, Jr.
                                                            President and CEO