Botany Collections

The Department of Botany manages the fifth largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere, estimated to include 2.7 million specimens of angiosperms, gymnosperms, pteridophytes, bryophytes, fungi (including lichenized ascomycetes), and algae. The Herbarium was established in 1894 based on acquisitions from the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Numerous botanical expeditions, sponsored or co-sponsored by The Field Museum, have established the herbarium as one of the world's preeminent depositories of Central and South American plants and approximately sixty percent of the phanerogam collections are from these areas.

Important early collectors included C. Millspaugh, J. H. Greenman (Mexico and Central America) and B. E. Dahlgren (Cuba, Brazil and British Guiana). The Flora of Peru, initiated in 1922 by J. F. Macbride is continued today by M. O. Dillon. Specimens generated from this project have provided The Field Museum with one of the world's best collections of Peruvian plants. Macbride also spent nearly ten years in Europe photographing type specimens of South American plants at major European botanical institutions and arranging for exchange of numerous Latin American specimens (many of them unmarked types from the herbaria in Vienna, Paris, Madrid, Geneva, Munich, and Berlin) of collectors that are not well represented in other United States herbaria (e.g., Ruiz and Pavon, Blanchet, Glaziou, Pohl and Schott).