Sue's Several Heads: The Evolution of the Natural History Museum

Just as Hamlet contains "words, words, words," museums hold and display objects, objects, objects. Depending on how they are presented these objects may be seen as art, or as entertainment, or as embodiments of knowledge and ideas.This article is about the meaning of artifacts displayed in a natural science museum. It starts from a single object, a dinosaur fossil very conspicuously advertised and displayed by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. That fossil, and its surrounding exhibits, are used as tools for the examination of the science museum in historical context, to see the museum's relation to our society, to corporate culture, and to science itself.

The Heads

Start with Sue's heads. Sue is a Tyrannosaurus rex, said to be the largest fossil of her species in the world. Her skull is on display in two different places in the Field Museum. First it sticks forward from an armature holding a 42-foot-long arrangement of Sue's bones placed in a lifelike and menacing pose. The fleshed-out dinosaur can also be seen in a painting of a ferocious Sue set into an architectural niche above the skeletal display. Another skull can be found on a balcony above the primary display in an exhibit devoted to explaining how the skeletal remains were cleaned, prepared, and put together to produce the effect seen below.

At first, I was confused by the apparent doubling of what must be a unique artifact. How could Sue have two heads? As a physical scientist I like puzzles and their solution. So I set out to learn more.The placards on the exhibits said that the upstairs head was the real one and that the downstairs head was a facsimile. The sign also said, rather implausibly, that the steel framework was not strong enough to hold the real skull, necessitating putting the constructed one in its place. ¹ The visitor was also informed about which of Sue's displayed "bones" were reconstructions rather than parts of the fossil.

Often, scientific exhibits employ distinctions of color or texture to enable the viewer to distinguish the actual remains from reconstructed parts. Art objects, on the other hand, tend to be reconstructed without visible distinctions, so that the viewer might get a feeling for the intentions of the original artist.This scientific convention conveys the verisimilitude of the ancient objects and conveys the importance of the "original," true thing. Sue's reconstruction enjoys no easily visible distinctions. It seemed to me that in constructing this display the Field Museum had aimed at creating a thing of beauty, but in the process missed out on an opportunity to show a special regard for a scientifically important object.

According to Steven Conn's Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (1998), the entire rationale for having a museum was to store and display artifacts. In the 19th century, curators argued that by a proper arrangement and display of appropriate artifacts a museum could bring the public to appreciate and understand nature's creation. Why does the Field Museum now seem to make Sue's fossil into an art object?

A Little History

I began to read about this exhibit, the Field Museum, and about natural history museums in general. I particularly wanted to know how and why the Field Museum had come to house such a peculiar mixture of entertainment, art, and science. How could it employ almost 70 Ph.D. scientists while constructing displays that appeal mostly to family groups and pre-teenagers? How can it be a nature museum, with vast and wonderful stores and displays of all kinds of preserved animals, plants, and human artifacts, but have so very little up-to-date science? For example, there is almost no molecular biology or treatment of ecology.Why is there little discussion of pollution, extinction, or AIDS?

Natural history...