Lakeland science students enjoy Field Museum visit
Lakeland University students in Paul Pickhardt’s BIO 320 evolution course recently spent a day at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
In addition to going through the exhibition halls on our evolving planet and the conservation issues of our time, students were taken behind-the-scenes to see research collections held at the museum.
Pickhardt’s colleague, John Bates, curator and the section head of Life Sciences research at the Field Museum, provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the students to observe and handle preserved birds from the fourth largest collection in the world.
Bates pulled out numerous bird specimens illustrating the utility of cataloged collections for addressing scientific questions related to climate change, toxicology, sexual selection, natural and artificial selection, epidemiology, bird/airplane collisions and species conservation.
The students were able to observe a bird of paradise collected by A. R. Wallace – who along with Charles Darwin came up with the mechanism of natural selection as a means to produce evolutionary change in the 19th century – and the organism preparation room where scarab beetles clean animal skeletons to prepare them for display.
Pickhardt has taken Lakeland’s evolution class to the Field Museum for a student as practitioner experience (SAP) every time he has taught the course.
Photos show BIO 320 class members Alex Meer, Serena Brunner, Gretchen Augustine, Diana Rodriguez, Emily Pautz, Olivia Heling and Josephine Huddock in various spaces behind the scenes at the museum and at the south entry to the museum.
