Press Release

Left: Field Museum Herpetology Collections Manager Chun (Rachunliu) Kamei, who specializes in amphibians of India, holds “Andre,” a Japanese giant salamander specimen in the Field’s collection. Right: Kamei holds a jar of frog specimens as Field President and CEO Julian Siggers, PhD, looks on. Bridgette Russell/Field Museum

The Field Museum, along with 72 of the other largest natural history museums in the world, have joined together to take stock of their collections. A new paper published recently in the journal Science details these museums’ work on inventorying their collective holdings, in hopes of making the global network of museums’ scientific material more accessible to researchers-- work that is increasingly vital in light of the climate crisis.

Like many natural history museums, the Field Museum’s collections go far beyond what’s on display. More than 99% of the nearly 40 million specimens and items making up the museum’s collection are behind the scenes, where they play a vital role in scientific research.

The museums’ goal is to create an inventory of global holdings that can help scientists and decision-makers find solutions to urgent, wide-ranging issues such as climate change, food insecurity, human health, pandemic preparedness, and wildlife conservation – a moment that couldn’t have come at a more critical time, says Field Museum President & CEO Julian Siggers, PhD.

“We know that the time to address these challenges is now—the recent United Nations report underscores this urgency, as does our own experts’ research,” Siggers says. “Collections hold vital traces of the past that act as important clues to how we face the future.”

Natural history museum collections are like a library of life on Earth-- the shells, skeletons, pressed plants, pinned insects, fossils, and more that make up these collections serve as a record of what lived when and how those patterns are changing in the face of climate change and habitat destruction.

Museum collections can raise alarms about climate change

In recent years, the Field’s scientists have used the museum’s collections to document how birds are shrinking due to climate change and laying their eggs earlier due to warming temperatures. they’ve tracked the presence of microplastics in local fishes’ digestive tracts over the past 100 years and used DNA to confirm the habitat-destruction-driven extinction of a silvery blue butterfly from California. The museum’s collections can also be used to create change-- decades ago, historic collections of eggshells were used to help ban the use of a pesticide that threatened US populations Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles.

The Field’s amphibians collections, one of the best in the world, contain specimens of often-overlooked animals that serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for environmental change-- they're cold-blooded, so even small changes in the Earth’s temperature affect them, and their porous skin makes them extra-sensitive to water pollution. As scientists work to document how human activity is shaping the planet, amphibians serve as “star witnesses.”

Combining information from the Field Museum’s collections with those of natural history museums around the world could provide critical data for scientists and conservationists. But until recently, most of the world’s natural history museums worked largely in isolation. This international collaboration to inventory 73 museums’ collections, showing roughly how many specimens each museum has and which geographic and biological categories they cover, is the first step in remedying this issue.

The Science paper detailing the museums’ work can be found online in the Science press package.