And so another field season in the mountain desert of Fossil Basin has come to an end. Everyone has returned safely to the turmoil of his or her urban/suburban environment in Chicago, Amherst, or London. Other than a few minor bumps, bruises, and bee stings, everyone came through no worse for the wear. Even our dog made it back ok. As is usual after these Wyoming expeditions, most of our killer tans have washed down the shower drains (turning out to be mostly a crust of dust, dried sweat, and sunscreen), but most of us feel a bit more fit due to the weeks of exercise and getting back to the oxygen-rich lower altitudes. As for the material we collected in the field, this is only the beginning. From this point on we begin the long and diverse process of incorporating this material into the Museum's permanent research collections, where it will be available for research, study, exhibition, and education, as long as there is "The Field Museum of Natural History."

The collections are one of the two main components of the Museum's lifeblood (the other and most important component being the museum's top-notch staff). The Field Museum is much more than simply an exhibit museum or a "dead animal zoo," it is also a vibrant academic institution and one of the world's leading research museums. Its enormous collections formed over the last 110 years make up a unique archive of priceless scientific information; an international heritage. Less than one percent of the Museum's specimens are on exhibit. The other 99+% make up a carefully conserved wellspring of information about the natural world and human culture that is available for study to researchers from all over the world. The Museum acts as a lending library of natural history specimens, and our cataloged collections form the empirical base for tens of thousands of scientific publications.

We are committed to conserving these collections forever, so that when a publication refers to one of our specimens by catalog number, that same specimen can always be reexamined in the future by subsequent researchers to verify or dispute the scientific ideas generated by it. Without collections such as ours, and those of a handful of other major research museums around the world, much of the bulk of documented knowledge of the natural sciences would be in danger of collapsing like a house of cards.

The fossil fishes we collected will go into the fossil fish collection of which I am Curator. The Field Museum's fossil fish collection is one of the two largest in North America (the collection of the American Museum in New York is roughly the same size) and one of the four largest fossil fish collections in the world. The first illustration (Photograph 1) shows one of over 6,800 drawers of fossil fishes in the collection. I will personally use some of the material we collected this year for my own research projects on fossil and living gars, gonorynchids, and various other fish groups. Many of the other fossil fishes will be used by outside researchers from scientific institutions all around the world.

The fossil plants we collected will go into the paleobotany collection, and the fossil insects will go into the invertebrate paleontology collection. The rest of the Hebdon Green River bird collection that we brought back will join its other half in the fossil bird collection of the museum. There are currently several ornithologists and paleoornithologists competing to work on parts of this uniquely important collection. I also brought back the fossil primate that was on loan to the Fossil Butte National Monument from a private collector (see field dispatch 5, photograph 2 on the website). The collector agreed to let me have a mold and cast of it made for the Museum in return for our preparation of the specimen for him. This specimen is a rare complete skeleton of a species of Plesiodaphiformes (an extinct order of primitive primates), and the cast will allow us to get a clear record of this unique specimen into a public repository.

The newly collected material, like much of the material already in the collection, needs to undergo three critical processes before it can be effectively used and integrated into the main collection: vouchering, preparation, and storage.

The vouchering process, although time consuming, is critical to linking information to each specimen. In this process we accession each specimen, recording information about the time, place, and method of collection. Then we catalog each specimen, putting a number on it to link it to the data we have on file for the specimen. The catalog number also serves to identify each specific specimen referred to in publications. Once the specimen is cataloged we can file it with the rest of the systematically arranged collection and use the catalog number to retrieve it in the future when we need it, just as a library catalogs its books with various numbering systems to aid in retrieving specific titles on demand. With about 20 million specimens in the Museum collection, systematic organization and vouchering numbers are absolutely critical for retrieval of specific specimens and bits of information when we need them. We are now in the process of computerizing all of our past catalog and accession records into a large museum database, a process that is expected to take a decade or more.

Preparation is another vital part of the collection process. Most specimens we find are in need of special preparation in order to use them adequately for study or exhibition and to conserve them for long-term storage. In the case of the fossil fishes we collected, most of them are found covered by a thin layer of rock that must be removed in order to clearly see the fish skeleton (see Step 8, Interactive Maps on the website). After careful preparation and study, the specimens will be put into foam-padded drawers in dust-free cabinets to conserve their usefulness for many decades (hopefully centuries) to come.

Storage is yet another vital part of collection building. With about 20 million accessioned natural history objects here at the museum ranging from DNA to dinosaurs, and the amount of growth in the collections over the last 80 years, we are in critical need of collection storage space. Most recently, the museum has been struggling (financially) to complete its "Collection Resource Center" (CRC); an 80 million dollar project that will add about 200,000 square feet of badly needed expansion for past and future collection growth. The second illustration (Photograph 2) shows a section of the partially completed CRC construction. Hopefully, the CRC will be completed in the next two years, through the generosity of state and city agencies, and individuals such as you at home reading this. The downturn in the economy over the last several years has made financing for projects such as the CRC extremely challenging. But we continue to try to find ways to fund such necessary projects. So I suppose that I should probably add a fourth critical factor necessary to the collection integration process: fundraising.

And so, as complicated and critical as the process of fieldwork is to the museum, you can see that it is only a piece of a much broader entity. World-class natural history collections, such as those of The Field Museum, are rare international treasures of material and potential knowledge that give us a unique understanding of the diversity of the natural world. At the Museum it is our task to be guardians and caretakers of this immense store of data and knowledge for generations to come, just as the world's great libraries curate the written word of humanity's various societies and cultures. It is also our responsibility to form a world-class research institution whose charge it is to use collections such as ours to interpret the history and diversity of nature and of human culture. A better understanding of the natural world as a whole not only enriches our lives culturally, but perhaps also gives us a better base on which to face the future.

If you have read this far, you must be an enthusiast of the subject of natural history. If that is the case, I hope that you will continue to support The Field Museum. We (the Museum staff) love what we do and we work extremely hard at it; but we also realize that the continuation of our work is largely dependent on you. Please continue your generous patronage so that we can continue to maintain a major research driven natural history museum in Chicago whose research programs and collections are among the world's very best.

Remember, in mid-September I will be hosting an online Q&A session during which I will answer some questions sent in by you (email questions must be received by September 8, 2003). If I don't get to your question specifically, I apologize in advance. Maybe I will see you at the next Field Museum Members' Night. Best wishes.

Sincerely,