The Negaunee Integrative Research Center

Thorsten Lumbsch has served as Vice President of Science & Education (now Collections, Conservation, and Research Division) since June 2017. Thorsten joined the Museum as Curator of Lichenized Fungi in 2003.

In addition to his administrative and research roles, Thorsten is also active as a mentor to the scientists of tomorrow. He is a lecturer at the University of Chicago, and is active in advising graduate students there and the University of Illinois–Chicago. He also supervises postdoctoral scientists at the Museum and participated in K-12 educational programs, and served as content adviser for the exhibit Lichens: The Coolest Things You've Never Heard Of (2014–2017).

Thorsten previously received the Gerhard Hess Award from the German Science Foundation for outstanding young scientists in 1999, and in 2017 he was named a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher.

The new Fellows will be celebrated on September 21, 2024 in Washington, D.C.

April 19. 2024

Jim was an expert in, and published extensively on, Upper Paleolithic archaeology of the Levant. His research focused on why human populations settled down near the end of the Pleistocene, and the development and relationship between modern human populations and the latest archaic humans, the Neanderthals. His published works include dozens of journal articles and book chapters, four edited volumes, and numerous monographs. Although he was not an expert in later Egyptian prehistory, Jim was the Field’s de facto Egyptologist, and was a consummate exhibitions content specialist for more than two decades, provided scholarly guidance and insight on Dead Sea Scrolls, Cleopatra, Eternal Egypt, King Tut, Mammoths, Horse, Mummies, Lod Mosaic, and Lascaux. In fact, he was instrumental in getting the Tut show to the Museum in 2006. He was also a popular leader of Field Museum tours, which ranged from Paleolithic cave sites in southern Europe to the pyramids of Egypt to the ruins of ancient Turkey. In 2008 Jim administered a program that trained 18 scientists from the Iraq National Museum and other Iraqi cultural institutions in conservation methods, collections management techniques, and modern museum practices, supported by a $1.2 million grant to the Field and the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute from the State Department’s International Relief and Development Unit. He was also involved in several large-scale CT scanning projects focusing on Egyptian mummies and other artifacts.

Jim’s obituary, which includes tributes from many Field Museum friends, can be read here.

February 23. 2024

Volitation:  Flight is surely one of birds’ most fascinating characteristics. But flightless birds like penguins and ostriches are equally fascinating, if not more so. How is it that one group evolved a high-flying lifestyle, and one didn’t? Turns out, the ways the wings and feathers of flightless birds differ from those of their airborne cousins is still not well understood. Associate Curator Jingmai O'Connor and Bass Postdoctoral Fellow Yosef Kiat shed some light on the matter in a new study in the journal PNAS. In examining hundreds of birds in museum collections, they discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common, providing clues about how the dinosaur ancestors of modern birds first evolved the ability to fly, and which dinosaurs were capable of flight.

Yosef, a feather expert, launched a study of the feathers of every order of living birds, examining specimens from 346 different species—flying and non-flying—in museums around the world. The researchers also examined 65 fossil specimens representing 35 different species of feathered dinosaurs and extinct birds. They found consistent traits among flying species. For instance, all the flighted birds had asymmetrical feathers, and between 9 and 11 primary feathers. In flightless birds, the number varies widely—penguins have more than 40, while emus have none. “It’s really surprising, that with so many styles of flight in modern birds, they all share this trait of having between 9 and 11 primary feathers,” says Yosef. “And I was surprised that no one seems to have found this before.” While Mesozoic birds and Microraptor have traits consistent with extant flying birds, the group known as anchiornithines deviate significantly, providing strong evidence that they were flightless. These findings will inform the ongoing debate as to whether flight evolved in dinosaurs just once, or multiple separate times. “Our results here seem to suggest that flight only evolved once in dinosaurs,” notes Jingmai, but she also acknowledges that the fossil record from the earliest stages of feathered wing evolution is scanty. Read more in the press release, at Discover Mag, or listen to J & Y discuss the research with Ira Flatow on Science Friday.

Vocalization: If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough about the syrinx—the vocal organ of birds—then you may well start doing backflips when you learn that Chad Eliason and colleagues have just produced another article on that device in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, hard on the tibio-tarsal joints of a paper in Current Biology on the same topic. We kid, but it’s actually quite interesting. The syrinx is a key innovation in the evolutionary history of vertebrate communication. Three major avian lineages, passerines, parrots, and hummingbirds, independently acquired both specialized syringeal structures and vocal-production learning (the ability to modify the structure of vocalizations as a result of hearing those of others); a functional relationship between the two has been proposed but remains poorly understood. In hummingbirds, the syrinx has never been studied comparatively alongside non-learning relatives in the parent lineage Strisores. In this new paper, Chad and colleagues from the University of Texas-Austin (including Research Associate Julia Clarke) describe the anatomy of the syrinx in 21 species of swifts and hummingbirds (most from FMNH) using enhanced-contrast computed tomography, which reveals structures previously unreported in the group. They also tested for correlations between syringeal and acoustic traits in a sample of hummingbirds and swifts using phylogenetically informed regressions. Swift and hummingbird syrinxes share certain morphological characteristics, and may be ancestral to Strisores. Meanwhile, certain differences in hummingbirds (a shortened trachea and tracheolateralis muscle) led to a significant negative correlation between tracheal elongation and maximum vocalization frequency—in other words, having a shorter trachea enables hummingbirds to produce high-frequency vocalizations.

February 23. 2024

Arborescent lycopsids exhibited considerable architectural diversity despite being subject to this developmental constraint, but Stigmaria ficoides has mainly been known to have branched by equal dichotomies. However, in a new study published in the International Journal of Plant Sciences, Negaunee Postdoctoral Fellow Michael D’Antonio and Negaunee Assistant Curator of Paleobotany Fabiany Herrera describe two new Stigmaria ficoides specimens that exhibited unequal branching of their axes. These specimens were compared to a spectacular S. ficoides specimen from the Field Museum Paleobotanical Collection, and after ruling out fossilization processes, preservation, and life history as potential explanations for the unusual branching behavior, the authors concluded that these specimens in fact represent evidence of a new developmental pathway for the species that is in line with the development observed in the shoot systems with which it is associated. This finding is part of a broader push by Michael and collaborators to better understand the anatomy, development, and physiology of the charismatic yet strange arborescent lycopsids.

February 23. 2024

European naturalists described the Cape lion as having a particularly black mane and as being morphologically distinct. However, alternative depictions and descriptions of Cape lions from Indigenous people reported mixed or light mane coloration. To shed light on this discrepancy, a Field Museum-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign team compared the genetic diversity and distinctiveness of Cape lions to modern lions across 13 African countries in a new study in the Journal of Heredity. FMNH authors are Thomas Gnoske (Assistant Collections Manager, Birds), Julian Kerbis (Adjunct Curator), Velizar Simeonovski (Research Associate), and from UIUC, Alida de Flamingh (postdoc, and first author), Ripan Malhi (Professor of Anthropology), Alfred Roca (Professor of Animal Sciences), and Julian Catchen (Associate Professor of Integrative Biology).

As Julian told a reporter, “the scientific name of the Cape lion, Panthera leo melanochaitus, literally means black mane, but this description was based on a single specimen. Historically, we see lots of examples of creatures that are large and attractive like lions, where everybody wants to claim that they’d discovered a new one, without taking into account variation in the population, or whether that species is even unique.” Earlier investigations focused on limited segments of the Cape lion genome offered the first indication that these lions might not be as distinct as initially believed. The new study represents the first comprehensive examination of the entire Cape lion genome in comparison to contemporary lion populations across Africa.

The team gathered samples from two Cape lion skulls housed at the Field Museum that were originally components of taxidermy mounts at the South African Institute in Cape Town (1828–1838). “Unlike most other Cape Lion specimens around the world, these specimens had a traceable history and geographic collection location,” noted Tom. “As such, it was a great opportunity and challenge to see what application of the newest genomic methods could tell us about these specimens.” Adds Alida, “working with museums like the Field is an exciting opportunity to apply ancient DNA analyses to better understand human-animal interactions. I think it’s an area that’s going to be studied more and more as genetic technology continues to advance.” The genetic data from the skulls was compared to 118 existing mitogenomes and nuclear genomes of 53 other lions across Africa. Analysis revealed that the genome of the Cape lions was diverse, and demonstrated genomic links with other lions from both the southern and eastern parts of Africa. The researchers also found that the Cape lion genomes exhibited high heterozygosity [the possession of two different forms of a particular gene, one inherited from each parent], and lacked traits commonly associated with small populations and inbreeding, characteristics frequently observed in endangered species facing population decline. The unexpected absence of such traits in the Cape lion genomes is particularly noteworthy, since the skulls were collected as the species was approaching extinction, suggesting that they were hunted so rapidly that their genomes didn’t have time to accumulate the signatures of long-term small population size. The genomic richness also suggests that these lions likely exhibited significant phenotypic variation, including diverse mane coloration, which aligns with alternative descriptions and Indigenous perspectives on the species. As Ripan observed, the genomic data and analysis didn’t match colonial descriptions of Cape lions, thus “identifying type specimens using information from people who are not originally from that area can result in ignoring diversity in a population that is important for understanding evolution.” The study also underscores the importance of trans-country parks and heightened genetic connectivity between populations across Africa in order to maintain genetic diversity and flow. The study was funded by the USAID Wildlife TRAPS Project, USDA, NSF, and the University of Illinois. You can get more information from the UIUC press release.

February 23. 2024

The extent to which pre-Columbian human societies occupied and significantly impacted Amazonian environments is a long-standing question that remain under active discussion. Data are particularly limited from terra firme forests, that is, formations located away from watercourses that occupy over 90% of the Amazon Basin. This new study investigates pre-Columbian influences on fire and vegetation in three regions of the western Peruvian Amazon through phytolith and charcoal analysis of terrestrial soils. One area, in the Tapiche-Blanco watersheds, had not been previously studied; relevant tree data and soil samples were collected during the Field Museum’s Rapid Inventory 27 in 2014. Previous phytolith research for the other two regions, the Los Amigos Biological Station and the area between the towns of Iquitos and Nauta, was expanded to study forest composition and cultural palm usage through time in more detail. The results indicate that the diverse forests in these regions remained intact and were little affected by human forest clearing and agriculture with annual seed and root crops during the past 2000–5000 years of prehistory. In limited areas within each region, usually in riverine environments, people planted domesticated palm species for food, building materials, etc., creating tree communities now have more domesticated palm trees than forests elsewhere. All in all, however, the accumulated evidence from various proxies indicates the persistence of diverse, forest-dominated pre-Columbian landscapes in western and parts of central Amazonia studied to date.

Two of the co-authors, Marcos Ríos and Luis Torres, are Action Associates who participated in the Tapiche-Blanco inventory. That’s Marcos in the top photo (left) with Nigel, during the RI27 in 2014. Luis spent two months at the Museum last summer (bottom right photo) to identify herbarium specimens from the Tapiche-Blanco tree plots established during that inventory. His visit was supported by the Science and Scholarship Funding Committee. Data from those plots are published with the new paper, and have also been incorporated into the Amazon Tree Diversity Network.

February 23. 2024