- I find this creature extremely charming.
It's got a very winning aspect to it.
- Smile at the camera.
- Hi, I'm Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura.
- I'm Jessica Hester, staff writer at Atlas Obscura.
- And today Jess and I are gonna be talking
to six employees of The Field Museum,
an incredible natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois.
But of course they are not at The Field Museum,
they are at their homes.
- Yeah, they're inviting us inside
to go see the amazing stuff that they've got
in their living rooms and just all over their apartments.
Dylan, you ready to do it?
- I am!
Let's go see their stuff.
- I'm a paleontologist.
- Digital-media coordinator.
- Exhibitions developer.
- Post-doctoral researcher.
- P.R. and science-communications manager.
- Collections-digitization specialist.
- You do seem to have some cool things in your home.
So what are you gonna share with us today?
- This is my fox, Smolder.
(Dylan laughing)
Yeah, when I first got him
he was just displayed in the open air.
So I decided I wanted to build him
a little kind of diorama enclosure.
The dioramas are one of my favorite things
at The Field Museum.
They're just these perfect snapshots of nature
in ways that I'm never gonna see it in real life.
Everything is just right there.
- This is one of the world's largest millipedes.
It's an African giant black millipede.
- Oh man.
- She's about 10 inches long.
They do get to be about 15 inches
and they could live in upwards of 10 years.
- Wow.
That is amazing.
I find this creature extremely charming.
It's got a very winning aspect to it.
- Millipedes are detritivores.
Smile at the camera.
Which means they eat decaying organic matter,
primarily plant detritus.
And so that makes them excellent nutrient recyclers.
They put a lot of nutrients back into the soil.
So they're very essential.
- So this was a cast skin of one of my stick bugs.
It basically uses gravity to help it come out of the skin.
- Yeah, yeah, where would it exit if you?
- So there's this hole and tear in the back of it.
You can sort of see it if the tail's not covering it.
But it just sort of like pulls itself out using gravity.
And what I've found incredibly interesting
about these molts is that in order to get oxygen
they have these sort of tubes that go into their body.
And you'll actually see the skin from the tubes
as like sort of these tendrils getting also a metamorphosis.
Like the skin from those tubes is coming out as well.
- I have my very first taxidermy that I ever did.
This is a Douglas squirrel and he looks pretty good
and he hangs around in my house.
- Did you make these for research
or just as like buddies? (chuckles)
- So it's not for research but kind of the reason
that I got into it was because I was involved
in it for research purposes.
- A lot of people don't know that The Field
is an active research institution
with hundreds of scientist behind the scenes
always discovering cool stuff.
- I'm a paleontologist and I study the ancestor
of mammals and dinosaurs which lived
between 250 and 200 billion years ago.
This is my cuttlefish air plant holder.
- Oh my gosh, it's so cute!
- Yeah, and I made this myself. (laughs)
- When you're making pottery though
is there any part of your science brain
that turns on and like is it important to you to get it
anatomically correct? - Oh, yeah.
Even when I was little actually
my pottery teacher was quite struck by how I would keep
my animals very like scientifically accurate.
- We have specialisms that are preserved in alcohol
at The Field Museum by the hundreds and thousands.
It's a good way to transport things back to the museum
and to keep them safe so that scientists can learn
from them for decades, centuries even.
Mine is not a research specimen.
One of my best friends got it for me for Christmas.
And when she picked it up, her Uber driver
kind of looked back at her holding this big old shark
and said, "Ma'am, I am sorry, your fish does not look well.
"I don't think he has enough water."
And she was like, "No, no, no, he's super dead, it's fine."
- (laughs) That would be very concerning
if that was someone's pet.
- This is an Emperor scorpion.
- Oh man.
- These are found in rainforests
and savannas of Western Africa.
So the millipedes and the scorpions
would not encounter each other.
- For the best I think. (laughs)
- Absolutely.
All scorpions fluoresce.
- Oh, yeah.
- It's actually glowing.
I mean in the dark it would be really significant.
- Do we know why they fluoresce?
- It's so funny.
It is still a mystery.
So many scientists have studied it
and they think it may be a way for them to find each other.
Maybe a way to ward off predators.
But, yeah, we don't really know.
I mean, there's a special protein
in the layer of their exoskeleton.
And even in death, even after they've died,
they still glow, which is so cool
because scorpion fossils glow as well.
- Are you worried at all about holding this giant scorpion?
- No, her sting would probably be comparable to a bee sting.
- It's a large wasp.
- The way that it's pinned is pretty unique
and artistically done.
The way that all the pins are sort of carefully placed
so that all the limbs, including the wings
and the antenna, are all out in display and flayed out
so that you can see every point of articulation.
- The way it's pinned is kind of an example of the care
and precision that went into the work.
- Oh, absolutely.
- This is Hans Moleman.
(laughing)
So here he is with his little face.
And he's got these big digging feet.
- Very alarming feet.
- Yeah, they're extremely alarming
And if you look at a mole skeleton,
they're absolutely insane looking.
It's like if you went to the gym every day
and only did arm exercises and never did leg day.
(Jessica laughing)
Cause that's what moles do.
Their hands are kind of positioned like this
and the part of their skeleton
that is the shoulder part is absolutely nuts looking.
So their arms are kind of like this all the time
and when they dig they press up and to the side.
So that's his back feet.
They're kind of, - Tiny.
- They're just little and his tiny little tail.
And then this is the front feet.
- You have an awesome plant behind you too.
How did you get into? - Yeah.
When I am in the field in particular
I often notice the plants around me
and often will take a cutting of something
that I see and propagate it.
When I was in South Africa I did that quite a lot.
But obviously I couldn't bring those plants
over to Chicago when I moved here.
- That's such a cool idea.
Like the going into the field and making a record
of sort of the places that you've been and the work
that you've done and then having your house reflect that.
- Yeah, definitely.
- Like all good museum folks I love collecting stuff
but I live in an apartment that is small.
And so I've started building kind of
like little mini rooms. (chuckles)
- That is so cool.
- Yeah, so I actually made this couch
and I like stitched all these like little tiny pillows
which are really fun.
And then a friend gave me this rug
which he bought from I think Macedonia.
And then this little like person hat I got
from Colombia when I was studying there.
And then there's like a little vase that I got
from Greece when I was on vacation there.
And then I inherited this little chair from a family friend.
And so I've started to kind of grow these little rooms.
And it's really fun!
- So, Robin I couldn't help but noticing
what looked like a bug tattoo on your arm.
An insect tattoo on your arm.
- Oh, yes, yes, yes.
This is my first tattoo.
And this creature is what's called an amblypygid
or amblypygi, which is a particular order of arachnid.
Or commonly known as a tailless whip scorpion.
I have a whole bunch of babies here
(laughs) I'm gonna show you.
- Yes! (laughs)
- What is remarkable about this particular arachnid
is that the mother actually exhibits
like a maternal behavior where she will use her whips,
they're long like sensory organs,
almost like antenna, to stroke the brood to calm them down.
And that is not known in the arachnid world.
- They're kind of like familial, gentle, friendly
- Exactly, exactly. - tailless whip. (laughs)
Wow!
They're beautiful.
- Thank you.
- I think one of the fun, interesting things
about talking to museum professionals,
natural history museum professionals especially,
is how much it's their passion
that drove them into this work.
Like how it's stuff that often started in their childhood
and how it bridges their professional and personal lives.
You know, it's not everyone who sort of
has the stuff that they work with all the time
at their job, little bits of that in their home.
And I think it just shows how much
of this is driven by personal interests and excitement
and the joy of doing the work.
- Totally, totally.
And we asked everybody what the first thing
they wanted to do when they go back into the museum was
and I felt all of this like curiosity and enthusiasm
kind of beaming off of them because so many people
that we talked to said stuff like
they wanted to go visit their fossils
and they missed their fossils,
or they wanted to go like pet the specimen that they study,
you know, like the taxidermy specimen or the pelts.
And I totally appreciated that.
Like they truly love what they do and that came through
so clearly and that was amazing to see.
- Thank you so much for showing us all of you.
(group chattering)
So that was us talking to The Field Museum at home.
- Tell us what other institutions are full
of amazing people doing cool work
and whose apartments you might want to see inside.
- Thanks for watching.
As always if you enjoyed this click the Like button,
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