Chicago Academy of Sciences Blog
Articles tagged Collections
August 25, 2026
Naming our Future - A Spongy Moth Revelation
Content Warning: This blog post contains a discussion of historic derogatory language that is present in the common names of some insects. Hello! My name is Forrester Faia and I am a Collections Intern with the Collections & Archives Department at the Chicago Academy of Sciences/Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. My project for the past 7 months has been processing specimens from the Teenagers Exploring and Explaining Nature and Science collection, also known as the TEENS collection. I identify, catalog, and label the different insects that were collected over the past ten years of the program into the museum's collections. When I started, I thought I would begin to tolerate insects a bit more. Not only have I become tolerant but, in fact, I have become obsessed with the wonderful world of insects.I didn't realize how much these little critters would grow on me as I worked to identify them, let alone how much I already liked them. I was looking through my camera roll and found images of pill bugs, a friendly praying mantis, and bountiful butterflies. Not to mention countless moths, beetles of all shapes, and even some arachnids, which are not insects but are just as cool. Even before I started identifying insects, I was taking photos of them. Until now, I haven't realized that my past was predicting my future.
July 20, 2026
I never expected crayfish to become one of my favorite animals. After more than a decade studying turtles, however, these overlooked crustaceans have broadened how I think about wetland conservation and about the importance of museum collections for wildlife conservation. This is a story about my newfound love of crayfish and how my current obsession highlighted the importance of museum natural history collections for both science and fieldwork.
January 13, 2026
From the Archives: Grand Plans for Laflin Building
Recently, the Collections & Archives staff were processing oversize documents from the institutional archives and came across building plans for the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ building circa 1894 by Patton & Fisher Architects.
December 19, 2025
A “Seedy” Exploration of the 1893 Colombian Exposition
Throughout my time as a collections intern at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum I worked on a variety of different projects, but none brought me as much personal satisfaction as my work identifying and cataloguing one specific collection of seeds. Over the course of my fall semester, I worked closely with almost 100 vials of seeds acquired from the Field Museum in the 1950s. While I originally thought I would just be counting, cleaning, and rehousing old seeds, the project became much more. The process laid out seemed simple at the beginning: moving groups of seeds from dirty old vials to clean and standardized containers, and then transcribing their information into the museum’s online collections management system, Arctos. During what could have been a tedious transcription process, I encountered a mystery, and ended up falling down a hole of late-night research leading me back to 1893.
April 15, 2025
These old herbarium labels are hard to read! Can you decipher them?
These labels include scientific names in LATIN, as well as Carl Linnaeus’ classification system using GREEK terms. The plant specimens were collected in Germany around 1900. Rather unique to these labels is the presence of the handwriting used at the time called KURRENT SCRIPT (or Kurrentschrift in GERMAN). It is challenging for us to read now, because it looks so different from our cursive handwriting. It has not been taught in German schools since 1941 so not many German-speaking people can read it either.
April 15, 2025
How Transcription Errors Stand the Test of Time As we in Collections continue to catalog our backlog of botanical specimens, we sometimes stumble on fascinating detours. One of my roles as Collections Technician is to catalog label data strictly as written, i.e., verbatim. Exact transcription is critical not only to honor the original intent of the collector, but also to provide unaltered data for future researchers. Handwritten script is often notoriously difficult to read (whether it be ornate, obscure or just plain messy) and this adds to the challenge of precise transcription. One recent batch of handwritten labels contained two-worded notation with Greek numerical prefixes (tri-, tetra-, penta-). I assumed the terms represented a system, but in the interest of efficiency, I entered the text “verbatim” without investigating the system itself. Eventually I came across the word "Teosandria (XII)" (see red box on label), which did not look Greek to me, and a Google search came up wanting. The word did exist, but only in two 19th-century botanical publications (Brazilian and British), so that's how I initially entered it into our database. As this word appeared on more labels, I wanted to verify it with a substantial reference. I looked more deeply at the first Google search result, the Brazilian Jornal Do Agricultor, (1888) and there it was in print, “Teosandria” (see red arrow).
February 20, 2025
The Importance of Herbarium Records in Environmental Science
As I was starting off my collections internship at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, I was not familiar with just how important herbarium records can be in the field of environmental science. When I think about research in the field of environmental science, my mind goes straight to observational experiments or current environmental samplings. However, after my time at the museum, I will now be thinking about how specimens from the past can help us understand our present. During this internship, I was able to be a part of this process by cataloguing, digitizing, and integrating specimens into our collections, so people could use them for research purposes. Despite just how many herbarium records there are and how useful these records are to illustrate the environment, they are an underused resource in the field. Digitizing these herbarium records have played a huge role in making them more accessible to promote this type of research. Plant specimens act as a great resource to inquire about past environments because plants cannot move. They are exposed directly to environmental changes and it shows in their composition. By studying these plants, we can learn about the environment they lived in and how it changed over time compared to other specimens.
September 12, 2024
Falling Leaves, Falling Feathers: How Birds Create Colors
Fall and the changing colors of leaves are so tied together, that there’s a good chance that the mere word “autumn” likely conjures a palette of orange, reds, and yellows. But the plants aren’t the only ones that shift into different hues as the temperature drops. Birds too will change colors as their now worn-out and damaged summer feathers drop off and are replaced by their (often less colorful) winter plumage. And while the color-changing properties of leaves come from chlorophyll breaking down and revealing the warmer pigments below, things get a little more complicated when we start talking about feathers. For starters, the colors we see when we look at a bird are not all due to pigments. Some colors are due to the microscopic structure of the feather itself, and these structures can even produce a shimmering iridescence. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with something a little more relatable to us humans.
June 15, 2024
Content Warning: The following blog post contains imagery and descriptions of specimen preparation. Did you know that not only are all of the animals on display at the Nature Museum real, but the steps involved in their preparation have been more or less the same for hundreds of years? Despite changing opinions on chemical preservatives, the process you can see happening today in the Beecher Lab would have happened in much the same way when our earliest specimens were being prepared for the collection.