After four years of preparation, the Field Museum is poised to open the most expensive permanent exhibit in its history, a $12 million high-tech panorama of a low-tech substance that has been around as long as the Earth itself: dirt.
The new exhibit, which represents the cutting edge in both cost and technology in the world of natural history museums, will “shrink” visitors to a half-inch high and transport them underground into the teeming world of an Illinois prairie.
As a biologist, there may be more glamor trekking off to the Amazon rain forests to look for new species of plants and animals, but the fact remains that one of the least understood, still-to-be-explored ecosystems is the one that used to dominate Illinois.
When local botanists and zoologists dig into one of the state’s tallgrass prairies, chances are they’ll come across some living thing never described before in science. And they don’t have to dig very deeply, either, to find new species: 6 inches or less is usually enough.
Scheduled to open Friday and previewed Tuesday, “Underground Adventure” is, in effect, a $12 million spadeful of dirt. It takes a clump of prairie soil a little smaller than the size of a standard shoebox and–re-creates it 100 times larger than in nature with highly detailed, walk-through models. At that size, it fills 15,000 square feet of exhibit space, reducing humans to wander through a tangle of plant roots, fungus and insect and animal tunnels and chambers.
It is one of the costliest exhibits ever to be mounted anywhere, though the American Museum of Natural History in New York opened a biodiversity exhibit last May costing $18 million.
The high costs come from expensive technologies now available to museums, said Roberta Faul-Zeitler, executive director of the Association of Systematics Collections, a Washington, D.C.-based trade organization for natural history institutions.
“The reason these installations cost so much,” she said, “is because of the substantial number of interactives and special effects they use, the large amount of space they take up and the effort made to incorporate education programming to link the exhibit with schools.”
Only very large institutions like the Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, Faul-Zeitler said, have the space and resources to take such an “unsexy” subject like soil and turn it into a story that conveys its true importance.
“We want people to leave their museum mindset behind when they come into the exhibit and really get them into the idea that they have gone down into the soil,” said Francie Muraski-Stotz, the Field Museum’s manager of exhibit development. “So the first thing people come into when they enter is a `shrink chamber,’ where we use some tricks to make kids feel that we’ve shrunk them down to one-half-inch high.”
The exhibit draws heavily on animatronic animals, interactive computer stations and meticulous re-creations of the dirt itself, right down to a wafting scent of worms.
From the exhibit perspective, a harmless garden worm becomes gargantuan, and common grubs, ants, spiders and other underground insects plainly could reverse roles and do some “human squashing,” if they were so inclined.
Just what is underground–even in the first 4 inches of soil, where most animal and plant life live and interact–still isn’t well understood by scientists.
“Thousands of species that are entirely new to science are unearthed each year,” said Petra Sierwald, a spider and millipede specialist at the Field Museum, “microbes, beetles . . . plants. So far we know nothing about them, their role in the ecosystem, or what information or uses they may hold.
“We do some research in Swallow Cliff Woods in Palos Hills . . . and we’re always finding new species. Life is far more diverse and numerous underground. Every third species on the planet is a beetle. There are 34,000 known spider species, 60,000 mite species, 100,000 kinds of mollusks.”
Sierwald and other Field scientists collaborated closely with exhibit designers to ensure accuracy of what is shown in the exhibit.
Modeled in exacting detail off their microscopic real-life counterparts, hundreds of animals in the exhibit normally invisible to the naked eye make an extraordinary and weird zoological collection known mostly only to biologists: nematode worms, springtails, rove beetles, pseudoscorpions, orbatid mites and tardigrades (also known as water bears).
The most striking animal in the place is an 11-foot crayfish that makes the ground tremble slightly as it crawls from the water table below up the wall of the exhibit. It is so big, contractors had to break through the concrete slab the museum sits on and dig a pit into the landfill below to accommodate it.
And an earwig, the itsy bitsy bane of many a bathroom, in the exhibit is 4 feet long and acts like it is about to lethally attack passing visitors. Many may find her endearing, however, as the warnings are chiefly to stay away from her just-hatched youngsters.
“She’s showing what good mothers earwigs are,” said Muraski-Stotz. “Maternal behavior is common for mammals, but it is exceptionally rare for insects.”
More Top Picks Best Coffee Grinder
The sheer number of organisms in the soil becomes clearer in an exhibit section that shows the equivalent of just a teaspoon of dirt enlarged 100 times. That little bit of soil is home to all manner of microscopic animals, including 300 nematode worms, 15 springtails (a primitive, wingless insect), 20 mites, a pseudoscorpion, millions of protozoa and a billion bacteria.
And that teaspoon of dirt–like any wilderness area–is a jungle. The protozoa eat the bacteria, the nematode worms, springtails, mites and pseudoscorpions eat the protozoa and each other. They, in turn, are food also to bigger predators.
In one chamber, exhibit designers have installed a very real-looking vending machine as though visitors could buy packets to feed to the menagerie: dead plants for millipedes, live plants for pseudoscorpions and animal droppings for fungus.
Knowing who feeds on what and how it all interconnects to make soil rich and fecund is a tantalizing question for scientists. Soil is the basis of human life, too, after all. All food that humans consume directly or indirectly springs to life from soil.
No place in the world is more blessed with good soil than Illinois, which is covered with a mantle of rich, black soil often many feet deep, built up over the last 12,000 years by the natural processes of tallgrass prairies.
Unfortunately, the prairie isn’t making any new soil, because there is very little prairie left. It once covered 70 percent of Illinois, but farmers converted most of it to cropland. Less than one-tenth of one percent of the original prairie is left in the state.
There is no imminent danger of farmland disappearing, but it is not exactly a renewable resource, either, so scientists want to learn more about the biomechanics of prairies. It may teach humans how to farm and build up the soil at the same time, mimicking prairie processes.
“How do you sustainably use soil?” mused Sierwald. “It’s a sort of culminating question.”
———-
The exhibit is open during museum hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Museum general admission is $7 for adults and $4 for children 3 to 17, students with identification and senior citizens. Admission to “Underground Adventure” is $4 for adults, $3 for seniors and $2 for children, students, teachers and military personnel. For more information, call 312-922-9410.