Field Museum of Natural History
natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, United States
The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH; also known as the Field Museum) is a private–public natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational and scientific programs, as well as its extensive scientific specimen and artifact collections.
A private nonprofit institution, the museum operates in close partnership with the municipal government agency Chicago Park District, which owns the land and building. The museum is run by a private Board of Trustees and funded through a combination of ticket sales, memberships, donations, endowments, and grants, along with some public funding for specific programs or maintenance.
The permanent exhibitions, which attract up to 2 million visitors annually, include fossils, current cultures from around the world, and interactive programming demonstrating today's urgent conservation needs. The museum is named in honor of its first major benefactor, Marshall Field, the department-store magnate. The museum and its collections originated from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the artifacts displayed at the fair.
The museum maintains a temporary exhibition program of traveling shows, as well as in-house produced topical exhibitions. The professional staff maintains collections of over 24 million specimens and objects that provide the basis for the museum's scientific-research programs. These collections include the full range of existing biodiversity, gemstones, meteorites, fossils, and extensive anthropological collections and cultural artifacts from around the globe.
The public source identifies “Field Museum of Natural History” as natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Field, Museum and Natural.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1122595. VIAF identifies the subject as 131422873. The Library of Congress control number is n79066352. Authority coordinates are 41.866, -87.617. 8 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Field Museum of Natural History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.