Field Museum of Natural History ... Biennial Report
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Understanding Diversity Field Museum of Natural History 1989/1990 Biennial Report Introduction, Page 2 Investigating Diversity in Nature, Page 4 Financial report, Page 20 Donors to the Collections, Page 34 Understanding Diversity in Human Cultures, Page 38 Volunteers, Page 44 Trustees, Officers & Committees, Page 48 The diversity of life is extraordinary. There are said to be a million or so different kinds of living animals, and hundreds of thousands of kinds of plants. But we don't need to think of the world at large. It is amazing enough to stop and look at a forest or at a meadow — at the grass and trees and caterpillars and hawks and deer. how did all of these different kinds of things come about; what forces governed their evolution; what forces maintain their numbers and determine their survival or extinction; what are their rela- tions to each other and to the physical environment in which they llve? These are the problems of natural history, problems that concern ourselves as animals and that concern us even more as originators of this thing called civilization — which is, after all, merely a rather special sort of an animal community. Marston Bates, The Nature of Natural History Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950. Reprinted by Prince' Copyright © by Marston Bates, © Renewed by Nancy Bi Introduction livery large organization lives with a verbal shorthand that compresses complex ideas or experience into a word or phrase. This seems inevitable, and the Field Museum is no exception to the rule. What should not be inevitable is that we fail to explain ourselves when we communicate with our friends. Among the Museum's most pervasive buzzwords are systematics and cultural understanding. Between them, they represent a large part of what we are about as an institution — the kind of research we do and the ethos that governs our educational work. In this report we've tried to illuminate those concepts. I hope that through them readers will gain a better understanding or the special role the Museum The plays in basic science, environmental education, and human relations. Objects of Our As I conclude my term as chairman of the Museum's Board of Trustees, Affection I want to thank my colleagues, the Museum staff and volunteers, the Chicago Park Pictured in this report are a few dozen of the District, and our public, corporate, and individual donors for helping prepare the nearly 20 million natural history ground for the Museum's second century. specimens and cultural artifacts in the In this regard, I should call attention to one fact that pops out of the Field Museum collections, along with financial figures in this report. In 1990, unrestricted contributions by individuals and a very few of the staff members, volunteers, family foundations increased 33 percent over 1989, and represented 65 percent of contributors, and visitors who make total unrestricted giving, up from 55 percent in previous years. Despite the recession, these inert objects come alive. total unrestricted giving increased by 1 1 percent, to more than $2 million. These increases reflect not so much larger individual contributions as a large increase in the number of contributors. That is a happy development, not least because it creates a new base from which to build even larger constituencies in the future. Robert A. Pritzker, Chairman, Board of Trustees 'Systematics' and 'Cultural Understanding' — Between Them, These Words Represent a Large Part of What We Are About As an Institution Opposite: An Egyptian mortuary cloth depicting the goddess Osiris. Above right: a bronze mirror with a handle in the shape of a woman holding a papyrus blossom over her head. Both objects were collected by Edward E. Ayer in 1895 Investigating Diversity in the Neotropics Fungi, Fishes, Relict Forests, the Advance of the Angiosperms, the Family Life of the Blackbirds, and the Rise of Tiwanaku Inset: Jalcophila peruviana, a new genus and species of the sunflower family, Asteraceae, found by Michael 0. Dillon in the Andes of northern Peru. (Illustration by Peruvian professor Segundo Leiva Gonzales.) Background: Azorella compacta, an Andean cushion plant of the carrot family, Umbelliferae. When Field Museum the effect of ocean currents on desert scientists are "in the field," that could vegetation [page 10] and, not far away, mean Borneo or Iowa or Kenya, or any the ecological associations of small of numerous other locations around the mammals in Andean rain world. But chances of bumping into a forests. They have curator are highest in the New World, catalogued the 400 species between latitudes 23.5° north and 23.5° of the coffee family in south: the neotropics. Costa Rica, among other No doubt there are many floras and faunas, and idiosyncratic reasons why one-third of have been mapping the the Museum's curators — a dozen variation among the Ph.D.s with as many different research thousands of species of interests — have chosen to work in this tetras in the tropical region. The most important reasons, freshwater streams of however, have to do with institutional Venezuela. On the shores Above: test tubes containing pine roots tradition and commitments (the of Lake Titicaca, they are unearthing the inoculated with mushroom cultures to Museum's Flora of Peru project, for succession of cultures that led to the rise form the symbiotic relationship known as example, has been the work of and ultimate demise of one of the mycorrhizae. Background: generations of curators since 1921), and earliest empires in the Americas. In the a scanning electron microscope image of the extreme diversity of tropical Peruvian highlands, they have demon- the spores of Laccaria tortilus, magnified environments that so excites museum strated the independent evolution of 1,000 times. people. [See page 7.] birds confined to mountain peaks above Within this relatively small the clouds. area of Central America and northern These and other Field South America, Field Museum curators Museum research projects are in most have in recent years been able to study outward respects quite traditional. Curators find, collect, sort, describe, classify, and preserve the objects of their attention. But armed with computers, being amassed so they can be grown the techniques of molecular genetics, next to Costa Rican oak seedlings to analytical tools like "phenetics" and learn which are potentially able to form "cladistics," and machines like the a specialized symbiosis. Oaks and scanning electron microscope and the mushrooms form joint underground superconducting cryogenic magneto- structures called mycorrhizae on which meter, contemporary museum-based both are dependent, but the known scientists can often ask more difficult pairings have been worked out for some questions of their data than their temperate forests, not tropical ones. predecessors could. And frequently Foresters in Central and South America nowadays, especially in the tropics, their have been replacing stands of native oaks data and analyses have high utilitarian with foreign species, a practice that value for conservation and development. could lead to problems — plantations of Botanist Gregory M. foreign trees do not support the diversity Mueller, for example, has as one of his of native insects, birds, and other research projects a survey of the animals and plants that complex native mushrooms in the oak forests of Costa forests do. Mueller's research will help Rica, and he and his colleagues have enable the industry to develop collected more than 2,500 specimens. reforestation technology that does not These are being subjected to several upset local ecosystems. different laboratory tests, including In Ecuador, Peter R. Crane, Brycon falcatus, a electron microscopy, so they can be chairman of the Department of South American tetra collected by Barry assigned a genus and species, their Geology, has found remarkably well Chernoff. relationships assessed, and information preserved fossil plants. Similar on their life histories obtained. Cultures assemblages have been found in Virginia of some of these mushrooms are also and Portugal and include minuscule flowers that still contain pollen grains. Under the scanning electron micro- high-latitude spruce and pine forests. Below and background: Scanning scope, these hundred-million-year-old This news, and the analytical methods electron microscope images of fossil pollen fossils have unlocked many of the employed by Crane and Lidgard, have grains about 100,000.000 vears old. mysteries in the reproductive biology of attracted wide interest, basal angiosperms — the primitive including in the oil industry ; flowering plants. Moreover, studying the — much or the worlds oil is "* ' Ski- "V\V- ' V^ -A "J* ' pollen preserved within the flowers found in mid-Cretaceous rock enables Crane and his Field Museum Funding from the Petroleum L*v ,«<ffi§fe colleague Scott Lidgard to interpret with Research Fund of the greater confidence the data in their American Chemical Society will support imposing study of the rise of the Systematics The kind of that Field — flowering plants, which is based on work most Museum scientists do is called systematics a word that is not in the vocabulary even of many well-educated people. Paleobotanist Peter Crane, chairman of the analysis of fossil pollen data from many Museum's Department of Geology, defines systematics as the science of "documenting and understanding the relationships between organisms. " At level, this collecting, parts of the world. To their own a basic means describing, and sorting