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Field Museum's Behind-the-Scenes Tours Show Off Hidden Collections

 The Field Museum is offering behind-the-scenes tours so people can get up close and personal with specimens and artifacts not put on display.
The Field Museum is offering behind-the-scenes tours so people can get up close and personal with specimens and artifacts not put on display.
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Courtesy Field Museum

CHICAGO — The Field Museum has thousands of specimens and artifacts, but its new behind-the-scenes tours will give people a chance to see even more.

The museum's series of tours — Museum Marvels, Curious Creatures and Science Secrets — will provide participants a chance to talk to museum scientists and see beyond what's on display. Only about 1 percent of the museum's 25 million holdings are on display.

"Some of the things you're going to see is the actual labs where people work," said Jeri Webb, the museum's director of business development. "When you go behind the scenes you'll actually be able to touch things, which is pretty cool."

The tours will be led by field guides who work in the museum's zoology, geology, botany and anthropology collections. The field guides will answer questions and talk about their areas of expertise, but they'll also have their tour groups speak with scientists working behind the scenes at the museum.

No one tour will be the same, Webb said.

"Part of the beauty of going behind the scenes with these people ... is that you never know who you're going to run into ... you never know which scientist might be coming through or have something to share," Webb said. The tours are "more serendipitous and exciting because you just never know. There's just this tremendous possibility of what could be happening."

Those on the Museum Marvels tour will see fossils, flora and entomologists at work. They'll finish the tour by heading to the Rare Book Room.

The Curious Creatures tour focuses on the museum's bird, insect and mollusk collections.

Science Secrets shows tour-goers the museum's cyrogenic storage, wet collections (specimens stored in formalin) and the mammal prep lab.

Webb, who said she has gone on "many" of the tours since they started, said the most interesting part has been seeing people learning.

"Absolutely every tour that I've gone on, people have said, 'I never knew that,' and they learn something new every day," Webb said. "Even one of the people who's like the head of our mammals collection said he learned all kinds of stuff, and that's just terrific."

The tours are $17 per person. They last about an hour and are offered from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.

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