The Field Museum maintains one of the world's largest and most comprehensive collections of Recent mammals. The collection was founded in 1893, with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and has grown steadily ever since, used the names Field Columbian Museum, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago Natural History Museum, and again Field Museum of Natural History. Collections of Recent mammals currently number 203,000 specimens and about 450 primary types, each category ranking it third among North American collections behind Washington (USNM) and New York (AMNH). The collections are of course unique, encyclopedic, and worldwide in scope. The collections from Chile, Peru, Madagascar, Tanzania, and the Philippines are probably the world's best.
A host of distinguished curators and other scientists have contributed to the collections' development, including D.G. Elliot, Carl Akeley, Edmund Heller, Wilfred Osgood, Colin Sanborn, and Philip Hershkovitz. Today the collections continue to grow through the activities of its curators (Larry Heaney and me), affiliated staff (Bill Stanley, Steve Goodman and Julian Kerbis Peterhans), and our students and associates. Douglas Kelt, Chris Yahnke, Victor Pacheco, Danny Balete, Mike Huhndorf, and Terry Demos deserve special notice for their commitment to the collections. Annual growth rates have averaged 2-3 percent since 1980, much of it from threatened tropical areas where the fauna is especially rich and poorly known.
'Don Felipe' (Philip Hershkovitz) in the Division's collections, 1991. Hershkovitz served with distinction at the Field Museum from 1947 until his death in 1997. The Field Museum's Mammal collections are fully databased. This step was accomplished with the dedication of Museum staff and associates, together with supplemental support of the National Sciences Foundation for verification (DEB-8821834), creating relational tables for tissues (DBI-9728985), and geo-referencing (DBI-0108161) and from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for converting this database from C/Base (a UNIX program) to KE EMu, which operates under Windows. Collection users help us to validate the database by alerting us to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in records. If you identify problems with our data, please notify me or our collection manager.  A few years back, the collection had this geographic distribution among biogeographic realms.
Continual collections growth renders all such appraisals only approximate.
If your envisioned use of the Field Museum's collections involves destructive sampling, please see our destructive sampling policy.
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