A visit to the Field Museum is a timeless exercise in humility. Think you could have outrun Sue the T. rex? Think again. Would you have fared much better in the air? Not if the Field’s sulking, life-size model of a Quetzalcoatlus, a winged predator the size of a Wright flying machine, has anything to say about it.
Now through the fall, the museum has more fodder for your nightmares, should you choose to take the plunge. “Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep,” co-presented by the Natural History Museum in London, shows off the skin-crawling predators that reigned our prehistoric oceans while dinosaurs walked the earth, with an epilogue connecting it to the present. It takes up residence off the museum’s main Stanley Field Hall until Sept. 5, at which point it will swim off to its to-be-determined next stop on a North American tour.
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All of the specimens on display come from the Natural History Museum, as do the placards accompanying the exhibit. Many were discovered in the British Isles. A placard next to a touchable Ichthyosaur cast explains that the original fossil was discovered by a preteen Mary Anning and her brother in 1811; the discovery kicked off Anning’s paleontology career, foundational to the field and recently fictionalized in the 2020 film “Ammonite.”
Tapped for its expertise in traveling exhibitions, the Field designed and built the incarnation of “Jurassic Oceans” around the Natural History Museum’s materials.
“To use a movie analogy, (the Natural History Museum) was the producer and the scriptwriter, but we’re the ones who shot and edited,” says Marie Georg, senior exhibit developer at the Field.
“Jurassic Oceans” is roughly chronological, with some tangents. For some 200 million years during the Mesozoic era, reptiles reigned land, sea and sky; sharks, interestingly, were around just as long as many of the monsters at the heart of the exhibit, but only grew to become apex predators during the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and their marine counterparts.
And lest visitors find themselves unsure about who, exactly, was top dog in Earth’s prehistoric oceans, the exhibit presents species based on a “Fierce Factor” scale: a rating out of 10 ranking predators by their size, speed, teeth (sharpness, amount, size), and bite force.
The scores invite some fanciful imaginings of “Godzilla versus”-type matchups between species, but the reality is a bit more sedate. The creatures that earned “10s” on the Natural History Museum’s placards — Liopleurodon, Mosasaurus and Megalodon, a giant shark — lived millions of years apart.
“There’s a long history of different groups of animals evolving to become the top predators in different time periods,” Georg says.
Co-exhibitions like “Jurassic Oceans” are in keeping with a larger trend toward shared collections, in which cultural institutions — not just museums but galleries, libraries and archives — view their spaces less as trophy rooms for their own holdings and more as portals to similar collections around the globe. In a moderated conversation on March 2 marking the opening of “Jurassic Oceans,” Field president and CEO Julian Siggers and National History Museum Director Doug Gurr spoke about their institutions’ philosophical shifts from a finders-keepers mentality toward a tide-lifting-all-ships outlook.
“Different natural history museums will have different strengths in collections — in some ways, there’s remarkably little overlap and duplication. So really, what we have is a single global collection, distributed in a relatively small number of institutions,” Gurr said.
Shared collections are not merely a handy way for museums to fill out their exhibits with richer, more diverse material. Some cultural institutions, from museums to libraries, are bracing for a future in which COVID-esque disruptions due to extreme weather are the norm, not an anomaly. That long-view contingency means exhibits should prepare to come to us and not the other way around, including at home. Digital exhibits — whether straightforward desktop builds or bleeding-edge immersive augmented reality/virtual reality experiences — are already here to stay.
“The pandemic has taught us the importance of making that global collection visible. Getting a small group of like-minded institutions together could really unlock unbelievable power,” Gurr said.
“Never underestimate mutual self-interest,” Siggers added. “We’re better together — we can actually do more work as partners.”
“Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep” runs through Sept. 5 at the Field Museum, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets and more information at 312-922-9410 or fieldmuseum.org