2010 Annual Report to the Board of Trustees
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE FIELD MUSEUM 2010 ANNUAL REPORT TO THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES COLLECTIONS AND RESEARCH Office of Collections and Research, The Field Museum 1400 South Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60605-2496 USA Phone (312) 665-7811 Fax (312) 665-7806 http://www.fieldmuseum.org - This Report Printed on Recycled Paper - 1 CONTENTS 2010 Annual Report ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Collections and Research Committee of the Board of Trustees .................................................................. 9 Encyclopedia of Life Committee and Repatriation Committee of the Board of Trustees ........................... 10 Staff List ...................................................................................................................................................... 11 Publications ................................................................................................................................................. 16 Active Grants .............................................................................................................................................. 38 Conferences, Symposia, Workshops and Invited Lectures ........................................................................ 56 Museum and Public Service ...................................................................................................................... 64 Fieldwork and Research Travel ................................................................................................................. 75 Public Education and Outreach ................................................................................................................. 81 Higher Education ........................................................................................................................................ 94 Training Programs ................................................................................................................................... 103 Collections and Research Interns ............................................................................................................. 108 Resident Graduate Students ..................................................................................................................... 111 Collections and Research Volunteers ...................................................................................................... 112 Honorary Appointments ............................................................................................................................ 114 Collection Statistics ................................................................................................................................... 123 Biodiversity Synthesis Center .................................................................................................................. 128 Fieldiana .................................................................................................................................................. 130 Library ....................................................................................................................................................... 131 The Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution ........................................................... 132 Scanning Electron Microscope ................................................................................................................ 134 Scholarship Committee ............................................................................................................................ 135 Honored Retirees ...................................................................................................................................... 136 2 COLLECTIONS AND RESEARCH – 2010 ANNUAL REPORT At some point virtually all of my colleagues in C&R have occasion to give tours of our laboratories and research collections to an array of visitors—students, donors, new trustees, government officials, and assorted friends and neighbors. The reaction is invariably the same: wide-eyed wonder and comments to the effect, “I had no idea all this was up here.” The research being conducted at The Field Museum, and the rows of collections that seem to go on forever, are no surprise to our scientific colleagues, our members (who flock behind the scenes in the thousands each year on Membersʼ Nights), and most of our key supporters. But to the rest of the public, including the vast majority of Chicago-area residents, our scientific activities and resources remain largely unknown—as we often remark, The Field Museumʼs “best-kept secret.” It is at once understandable, and a shame. Understandable, because our most visible aspect to the public are our exhibits, only some of which highlight Field Museum research. A shame, because there are so many compelling stories within C&R, tales of exploration and discovery, dramatic advances in scientific knowledge, and mysteries of the natural world being unlocked. The challenge is how to get more of our stories told to the greater public, by better exploiting existing channels of communication, and creating new ones. We want our world-class science to be available to more than just our fans; we want it to permeate K-12 classrooms, blogs, dinner table conversation, and water cooler banter. Our stories are fascinating enough to warrant such interest. As I write this we have paleontologists unpacking from dinosaur excavations in Antarctica, a botanist just returned from collecting mosses and liverworts in Tierra Del Fuego, and an archaeologist reviewing the data from his dig in Kenya; meanwhile, another botanist is off collecting lichens in Thailand, a team of zoologists is heading for OʼHare for a field trip to Malawi, and flights are being booked and logistics planned for expeditions to Fiji, Chile, Madagascar, Tanzania and other far-flung locales later in the year. Every few weeks one scientist or another returns from fieldwork with new species of plants and animals, and exciting finds about ancient cultures—as well as “tales of the field”: work halted by torrential rains and earthquakes, narrow misses with armed rebels, cancelled flights because of civil rioting, kidnappings, pursuit by bandits, and of course malaria, intestinal worms, shark bites, and unusual local cuisine. Stories like these have the sense of adventure that people associate with scientific expeditions, as well as the allure of exotic or rugged locales, and we can capitalize on that. With the sense of adventure comes the thrill of discovery—an ancient burial site in Mexico, a tiny mouse in the Philippines, a previously unknown dinosaur precursor from Tanzania. Our scientists described almost 200 species new to science between January 2010 and the present, bringing to over 1,000 the number of “new” organisms identified in the 20 years we have been keeping track. Each one adds another branch of detail to the tree of life, just as the chemistry of a newly-fallen meteorite yields fresh information about the history of our solar system, and the excavation of a long-buried community reveals how people lived during the reign of Chinaʼs first emperor. Each organism and object has a story to tell. One of our biggest stories of the year was the announcement in Nature of a new dinosaur relative by Geologyʼs Ken Angielczyk and a team of international colleagues. The find, touted as the “earliest dinosaur relative,” was covered by the BBC, National Geographic, London Times, MSNBC, the Telegraph, USA Today and many more outlets. Still other stories donʼt emanate directly from field discoveries but from our labs—from analyzing DNA, or simply from crunching data. Early in 2010 Kevin Feldheim of our Pritzker Lab co-authored a paper documenting for the first time that some female sharks are capable of producing multiple, viable offspring through parthenogenesis—that is, requiring no “contribution” from a male. The phenomenon had been observed before, but in those cases the pups did not survive. Kevin and colleagues documented two cases in which the offspring survived for more than five years. The story was picked up by Science Daily, USA Today, Washington Post, NBC, Discovery.com, and many more media and internet sources. Later in the year Anthropology Curator Bob Martin and colleagues used statistical modeling to propose that, among other things, the evolutionary divergence of humans from our closest primate relatives likely 3 occurred about 8 million years ago rather than the 5 to 6 million year estimate usually given by scientists. The teamʼs novel approach used statistics to fill in gaps in the fossil record, and the revised estimate will enable scientists to better interpret the history of human evolution—for example, the fossil Sahelanthropus tchadensis discovered in 2001, which eluded consensus on its classification (its human features did not seem to square with its 7 million-year-old age), makes more sense in light of thus study. This story was featured by U.S. News and World Report, Science Daily, and many U.S. and European science web sites. Philipp Heck, who joined us in 2010 as Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies, is using the Museumʼs Scanning Electron Microscope and various spectographic equipment at the University of Chicago to study interstellar dust gathered by NASAʼs Stardust space mission, looking for clues to the formation of the