I’m staring at a severed head.

It’s an old head, so that makes it better, maybe? It’s from Egypt’s Ptolemaic-Roman period of 332 BCE to 395 CE, the plaque on the glass case tells me. They think ancient grave robbers threw it away after tearing apart the body to get at jewelry, amulets, medallions and other valuables to pawn. The head is completely wrapped but for a section under the nose where the muslin fell off centuries ago. I see a dried, blackened philtrum leather-stretched back over small, flat teeth.

And this seems natural. It seems natural that giggling kids are being hushed among bodies, that this leather-stretched upper lip that once formed words and smiled is now laid on a table for my edification, education, titillation in a way I would find disgusting if the corpse were younger.

“A body that is 200 years old, what makes that any less palatable than a mummy that’s 2,000 years old? Boy,” Egyptologist Emily Teeter of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago said, taking a moment to think. “Boy, I really don’t know.”

The Field Museum of Natural History is tourist attraction, research institution and final resting place for more than 4,000 human beings, ranging from individual toe bones from Native American mass graves, to ceremonial trumpets carved from Tibetan femurs, to the current “Mummies” exhibit running through April 2019. And it’s just one of the Chicago museums and art galleries — from the Museum of Science and Industry’s body slices and plasticized human bits to the International Museum of Surgical Science’s trephined Peruvian skulls — where corpses are the exhibit.

But there are other collections that aren’t on display, relics of days when spectacle trumped education and it was hard to tell sideshow from research institution. Mummies torn to shreds in early 20th century “unwrapping parties.” Native American skulls plucked from graves as souvenir. Or medical oddities from black Chicagoans unfortunate enough to die poor with unusual bodies in the 1800s.

These are the stories of the bodies that don’t go on the museum floor, of the program frozen by the Trump administration that guides Native bodies’ return and of how Chicago institutions handle those people who, through no fault of their own, have a museum for a grave.

Skulls and the Star-Spangled

The guiding American law for bodies and museums — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA — relates only to bodies from the indigenous from U.S. soil, but the moral issues don’t stop where the law does, said Field Museum Repatriation Director Helen Robbins.

“Museums and other state institutions have a lot of other human remains too, and they have the human remains of the mentally ill that became medical specimens — or prisoners or criminals. People who don’t have power in the world, that’s what happens. It is a Native American, indigenous issue because of the history of what happened in this country and also in other colonized places, but there are human remains of African-Americans in museums, in universities, in surgical colleges,” Robbins said. “It’s a much broader reality than just Native Americans.”

The Field has repatriated more than 200 people’s remains domestically through NAGPRA and 200 internationally to indigenous groups including the Maori in Tasmania, the Inuit in Labrador and the Haida in British Columbia.

The mummies are staying put, Robbins said, as the Egyptian government is not considered the descendant of the pharaohs. Under Field policy, remains must be given only to descendant communities for proper interment — whatever that means in that culture.

“They could put them in caves, they could put them traditionally in trees or scaffold burials like they did in parts of the Plains. Burial, cremation, out to sea — whatever ‘repose’ would mean to that cultural group,” Robbins said. “But not sitting in a museum.”

Any institution that receives federal funds, even passthrough funds, has an obligation to report potentially Native American bodies to NAGPRA. Pending or recent NAGPRA cases includes museums of course, but also art galleries, universities, state historical societies, the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture and even the office of the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner after a man brought in a box of hundred-year-old Native American skulls and bones he found while cleaning out the house of a recently deceased relative.

NAGPRA Program Manager Melanie O’Brien said when NAGPRA passed in 1990, remains of more than 200,000 Native American people were identified in American museums. Now that number is down to 180,000.

“It’s a human rights law,” O’Brien said by phone from her DC office. “It’s about equating the rights of Native American dead to the rights that everybody else enjoys in this country. There’s a common-law understanding of what happens to your relatives that die, and that common law was not extended to Native Americans.”

All American grave repatriations stopped in May 2017, when President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke temporarily suspended all Department of Interior advisory committees, including the NAGPRA Review Committee. While existing committees received individual reviews to see if the administration considers them wastes of money, Zinke added new committees such the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee and the Royalty Policy Committee, which consists of mostly oil, gas and mining industry executives.

Tribes and museums that had already come to terms on transferring ancestral remains had to simply pause, waiting for Zinke to review NAGPRA, O’Brien said. The committee passed muster and will meet for the first time since then on Oct. 17-19.

Meteorites, Nazis and Slippery Slopes

NAGPRA scared researchers at first, Robbins said. Many were concerned it would open a floodgate of returning valuable scientifics specimens, and not just bodies. NAGPRA also covers the return of sacred objects — like pipes, headdresses and kochina masks — and “objects of cultural patrimony.” Those are objects so central to a tribe’s identity, it’s considered owned by all members; O’Brien uses the original Star-Spangled Banner that inspired the national anthem as her example.

Many scientists feared the slope would slip and NAGPRA could mean turning over insects, fossils, botanicals — and the valuable intellectual property from any medicines derived from such plants.

It wasn’t an unreasonable concern. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon tried to use NAGPRA to reclaim the Willamette Meteorite — which the Clackamas people called Tomanowos — from New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1999, as Tomanowos was the traditional site of religious ceremonies. (They came to a deal — the museum kept the meteorite, but tribal members can schedule private ceremonial visits.)

As Field showstopper SUE the T-rex was found on Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation land held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, those initial concerns of a specimen floodgate hit close. They also largely haven’t come true.

“I’m not worried that we’re going to have a huge request for botanical specimens or insects or certain kinds of things,” Robbins said. “But the world is changing and shifting and people are asserting ownership over items that 100 years ago nobody would have considered to be claimable or anybody’s cultural property or intellectual property.”

Robbins’ job puts her between researchers and indigenous people, sometimes uncomfortably. While the Field offers bodies back to the tribe — there are 300 people’s partial remains waiting to be picked up and another 1,000 offered to NAGPRA with no tribe claiming them — getting back a sacred object or item of cultural patrimony “isn’t a slam dunk,” Robbins said.

“You have to have a certain tolerance for having people yell at you or be upset, whether its from other institutions or from descendant communities,” Robbins said.

No matter how respectable and above board the museum was in its acquisition of a sacred piece, if they got it from a person who got it from a person who got it from a person who acquired it illegally, it’s not the museum’s.

“The closest that you can come to this kind of process or legal process would be the work that’s done around looted Nazi art,” O’Brien said. “Museums have priceless collections of artwork that, through provenance research, can actually be shown was looted in World War II by the Nazis, was bought by the museum and the museum actually doesn’t have good title to that.”

And some of the pieces were most certainly not acquired with consent, whether sacred relics or human bodies.

“Some of the early collectors, they just walked around picking up human remains,” she said about the museum’s collection of Native American dead. “Late 1800s, early 1900s. ‘Aw, I’m living in Arizona, just walk around picking up human remains.’ They weren’t scientists. They just thought it was cool or interesting.”

Pickled Punks

Repatriating bodies is a global issue. British academics are working to find a suitable resting place in India for the skull of 1850s rebel Havildar “Alum Bheg,” executed by the British in 1857 and found in the back room of The Lord Clyde pub in Kent in 1963. Irish activists including the mayor of Derry have petitioned the Royal College of Surgeons in London to release the body of Charles Byrne, the 7 foot, 7 inch “Irish Giant,” who died in 1783. Anatomist John Hunter acquired the body somehow — the most popular account is that he paid off the undertaker and had his agent fill the coffin with paving stones to dupe Byrne’s friends.

He chopped up Byrne’s body, boiled his flesh off and, while The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum is closed until 2021 for renovation, has displayed the skeleton ever since. Because Byrne was tall.

Some long-sought repatriations have come to pass.

The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia returned the skull of World War I soldier Thomas Hurdis to the Australian government last year. Donated by an army doctor, Hurdis spent 98 years as part of the museum’s “dry specimen” collection of skulls and bones. Its “wet specimen” collection is body parts and fetuses — many of conjoined twins, including the shared liver of Chang and Eng Bunker the original “Siamese twins” — preserved in formaldehyde or other fluid.

“Pickled punks,” as preserved fetuses in jars were called, were a staple of 1800s sideshows.

Many medical specimens in museums, colleges and other private or public collections have questionable pasts, Robbins said, referring to the collection of mostly African-American medical oddities Rush Hospital gave the Field in 1900.

“Poorhouses, prisons, mental institutions, almshouses. If you don’t have money and you die, today even, what do you do?” she said.

But the issue, like the world, is complicated.

“It’s really important to understand too that human remains in institutional collections have huge scientific importance. Not only for abstract knowledge like anthropology and archaeology and the peopling of the world and all these kinds of more abstract intellectual things. How do you think people developed artificial knees or hips?” she said. “They did it from using, looking at and working with skeletal collections. But a lot of these skeletal collections are from problematic backgrounds.”

Representatives of the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Field is working on improving the standard of care for the thousands of human remains, even individual bone fragments, not on display. That includes separating co-mingled bodies from mass graves and, when applicable, storing them in a manner fitting that culture’s funeral customs.

They’re starting with the North American remains, then hope to apply that standard to all the people who rest in peace in the museum’s back rooms.

“It’s our responsibility to care for these individuals no matter how they got to the Field Museum,” Robbins said. “It doesn’t matter whether it was legal, scientific excavation or somebody wandering around in Montana picking up a skull.”

Wrapping Up

One of the mummies in the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is “just a bare body that was in a case,” Teeter said. It was a woman who was acquired, like much of the museum’s collection, by Dr. Henry Breasted, many when he and his wife went mummy-shopping during their 1894 honeymoon. She was stripped of all wrappings sometime between 1910 and 1930.

“We have no idea why,” Teeter said.

Teeter thinks the woman might have been used in an “unwrapping party,” a late 1800s, early 1900s entertainment that is exactly what it sounds like.

“This poor mummy, it’s being basically pulled apart for people to just look at it,” Teeter said. “You’d end up with this poor, naked body on a table and then party’s over.”

It wasn’t the most grotesque fate given to the pharaohs’ heirs.

“Certainly in the 1900s and the 1800s, mummies were dealt with in a much more cavalier way. You hear about them literally being ground up for medicine,” she said. “Every small museum needed to have a mummy, so people were going on the Grand Tour and just buying mummies helter skelter without any concern for their context.”

The unwrapped woman is in Oriental Institute storage, as are other unwrapped mummies and mummy parts. Three of the four regularly displayed mummies — 2,800-year-old singer-priestess Meresamun, 2,400-year-old priest Petosiris and 2,150-year-old “Young Boy” — are in full wrappings and, when available, coffin.

Teeter doesn’t expect the unwrapped woman will ever be displayed. A strip of fabric determined which mummies are showpieces, which storage.

“We exhibit mummies to show something about the culture, and showing just a body is not something about the culture,” Teeter said.

But there have been some unwrapped at the Institute.

One of the people — Teeter’s careful never to call them “specimens” or “things” — on regular display is completely without wrapping as part of a predynastic pit burial, when they weren’t wrapped. Similarly, an unwrapped head was temporarily on display as part of the recent “Book of the Dead” exhibit, which ended in March.

The purpose was educational both times, Teeter said. The unwrapped predynastic pit burial “was an important part of the story of mummification.” The decision to temporarily display the unwrapped head came after a more difficult conversation.

“We also want [museumgoers] to understand the full meaning of what they’re looking at, that it’s a beautiful box but the reason the box is there is that there is a mummy inside it,” Teeter said. “This is a person who chose to be, or his family chose to have him, prepared in this very particular way.”

It is “quite subjective,” Teeter said. She had to fight to get the child’s mummy displayed, but she fought against a guest curator who a few years ago wanted to display one of the collection’s wrapped heads.

“I said no. No. No, no, no, no. To show parts of a body, to me that was disrespectful and just plain ghoulish. There’s nothing to be really learned from that display other than [being] kind of creepy,” she said. “It’s a head torn off a body. It’s somebody’s head in a box. It’s like, ick.”

As sensitivities have changed over the years, different museums have reacted differently. Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit that visited the Museum of Science and Industry in 2005, 2007 and 2011 — and whose creators provided the plastinated specimens for the MSI’s ongoing “You! The Experience” exhibit that kept the Jewish boy from seeing Harry Potter in the story from Oct. 3 — trusses corpses up like art pieces.

On the other extreme, the Manchester Museum in England covered all its mummies in cotton shrouds in 2008 out of respect. That lasted two years, when they caved to public demand and re-uncovered the mummies. Other museums display trigger warnings that bodies are present, or put the humans in the collection in side rooms where no one could stumble upon them unaware.

Beyond the Native remains guarded by NAGPRA, there’s little guidance for how human remains can be displayed, said Teeter, Robbins, O’Brien and a few other museum folks who didn’t make it into this article, for reasons you’ll discover Thursday.

Instead, the reasons a pharaoh is science and a pickled punk sideshow is cultural, they said, part of a general shift in terms of what people expect of our museums.

“There should be a purpose,” Robbins said. “It shouldn’t just be ‘Hey, here’s the Irish Giant! Look! Isn’t that weird?’”

No dice.

So, in a sort of Hail Mary pass spurred by the fact the Field Museum moved SUE the T. rex out of the main hall so I have to find a new scene-setting bit for the intro anyway, here is the latest draft of the intro. Hopefully, it’ll whet your appetite to either take the tour or to say, “By gad, why I’m a publisher looking to find hot new properties that will appeal to adult nonfiction readers in the political science segment, the highest earner within Publisher Weekly’s History/Law/Political Science category, which saw 9.3 million unit sales in the first six months of 2017 — a 25 percent increase over the same six months in 2016! It makes great business sense to email this Paul fellow at 1001chicago@gmail.com!”

And if not, hey, at least you’re getting a fun read today.

***

Leaning from her mother’s arms, the little girl with the pink dress and Hello Kitty backpack reached out to touch the plaque beneath the monster.

It was the quiet time at the Field Museum of Natural History, the first few minutes after the 9 a.m. opening on a gray, murky Sunday. The great marble hall echoed tinny with each sound the early arrivers tried to muffle, each squeak of a sneaker or apologetic cough shivering among totem poles and taxidermied elephants. In blue patterned kurta tunic with long white linen scarf tumbling toward the ground, the mother was more traditionally garbed than her Kitty-hauling daughter. She helped her little girl — either a smart 2-year-old or a small 3 — trace the logo, guiding a tiny brown finger along the top three letters on the plaque. The girl squealed when she recognized the shape of the silhouette running across the letters.

“Dinosaur!” the little girl called.

“Sue!” her mother corrected.

Above the women leered a 65-million-year-old fossilized beast. Teeth like the Chinese daggers on exhibit a floor above, 10 tons of bone, rock, and death grinned at the mother and daughter in the near-empty hall.

She is Sue, the largest, best-preserved, and most complete pile of dirt ever discovered.

***

I call Sue dirt because she’s legally dirt. The 90-percent complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has been declared by a court of law in U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota and affirmed on appeal by the Eighth Circuit to be land. Not a creature nor the remains of a creature. By court order, Sue is real estate.

Deeming the dinosaur property was a way to moot a previous sale of Sue for $5,000 to the Black Hills Institute, a for-profit fossil-hunting operation out of the small town of Hill City, South Dakota. The BHI found the bones in 1990 on a parcel of land physically within the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation boundaries but held in trust for rancher and tribal member Maurice Williams by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It’s a complicated but common legal status in the area, a holdover from the days the U.S. government believed Native Americans weren’t intelligent enough to manage real estate. Any sale of land held in trust had to be approved by the U.S. Department of the Interior. So a judge called Sue land, ruling in 1993 that the fossilization process turns animal into earth. This made the $5,000 handshake agreement between Williams and BHI President Peter Larson a real estate deal, one Interior was never consulted on. The sale was invalid. Williams, whose widow later told Indian Country Today newspaper knew about the trust status the whole time, could find more profitable buyers, ones who would pay millions for a T. rex rather than writing “Therapod Sue” — an accurate description of the find but one that wouldn’t tip the fossil hunters’ hand — on the memo line of a check for the cost of an OK used car.

Sue’s status as dirt was the crux of a massive, yearslong legal battle that involved western land trusts, tribal law, the Antiquities Act, and a disagreement between cowboys over whether a handshake meant the right to dig or ownership of the fossil itself. After 35 FBI agents, 20 National Guardsmen, and an ambitious acting U.S. attorney witnesses said showed up already in makeup for the TV crews raided the small Black Hills museum in 1992, the government held Sue in lockup for three years while the courts decided her fate. The seizure kicked off a period of hyperbolic government attention on the BHI’s business practices, which culminated in a two-year prison sentence for Peter Larson on misdemeanor charges the statutes say deserve a maximum of six months.

After a six-and-a-half-minute bidding war in 1997, the Field, financially backed by a consortium that included McDonald’s and the Walt Disney Company, paid $8.36 million for this particular heap of what’s legally soil — $7.6 million to Williams, the rest as Sotheby’s commission. The Field wanted the fossil. McDonald’s wanted the gravitas. Disney wanted a cast of Sue to put in Orlando’s DinoLand USA without the PR nightmare of outbidding a museum.

The letters the Hello Kitty girl traced with her finger were all capitalized. That’s by design. The Field calls this bit of South Dakota real estate SUE in all licensing, branding, and marketing, from the jokey “(SUE in all caps, please)” on the 41K-follower @SUEtheTrex Twitter account to the museum’s gift shops, where you can buy SUE-branded shirts, stuffed animals, mugs, cake pans, commemorative spoons, replica teeth, replica claws, books, DVDs, etched highball glasses, and two separate SUE-themed craft microbrews.

The museum filed for its first registered trademark for the SUE logo — all capital letters, the scampering dinosaur silhouette that made the little girl squeal — on Nov. 30, 1998. The Black Hills Institute’s trademark for the more-traditionally capitalized Sue™ was abandoned the next day.

Sue tells a lot of stories, not all of them about evolution.

***

The alleys and skyscrapers of downtown Chicago tell their stories too. If the Field is a museum dedicated to natural history, the city it’s located in can be seen as a museum of murkier topics — corruption, tricksy deals, breaches of the public trust. After all, what’s a museum if not a tightly packed collection of exhibits?

This book picks out 20 publicly accessible spots that tell how greed curated an American city. The smallest specimen in this particular collection is a four-inch camera recording us from a stoplight. The largest is an Illinois House of Representatives district that’s seven miles tall and, at its thinnest point, two city blocks wide. In between, there are skyscrapers, street corners, statues, a line of bronze in the sidewalk, a glass mosaic, a sham saloon, and other physical evidence of the forces that made this town.

Yes, this is literally a guidebook. Yes, lace up your hiking boots and walk these streets. I’ve mapped bike routes versus walking, scoped out restrooms, picked a safe, public path complete with GPS coordinates, directions to comfy seating, and pretty stuff to look at once you get there. You’ll read about education funding by a Chagall, about the city’s early days surrounded by Tiffany glass, about segregation by the cover of a Wilco album. There are alleys to cut across, buildings to cut through, and you can top off the day at a beer-and-shots bar with a secret. It should still be a fun read from your couch, but my hope is to get you into these crooked streets so you can see for yourself how The City That Works works.

If you’re not from Chicago, the point isn’t to gape and tsk, but to show these techniques in situ for when your lawmakers try the same. Learn gerrymandering from the best, then spot it when it shows up in your maps. See how the pros cull property tax revenue for pet projects. Understand the political value of the tree-climbing fish. Chicago is far from the only spot on the globe where corruption flourished. It, like Sue, is just a large, well-preserved, and famously complete specimen of its type.

In selecting these stories, I looked for individuals in power who manipulated, misused, or abused that power for personal or professional gain. Some of these stories involve broken laws, others don’t. All the stories involve gaming the system. A crony-appointed U.S. marshal who arrested a colleague so the police couldn’t, and resorted to gunplay when the ruse didn’t work — gaming the system. A mayor who put 16 relatives on the city payroll while alderman (“If you can’t help your family, who can you help?” his mother told the newspapers) — gaming the system. A multinational parking meter deal leaning on the disclosure laws of Qatar and Luxembourg to shield the people who quadrupled the fees — gaming the system.

But you can’t understand how the system was gamed without learning a bit about the system. These tales of trust-breachers are a back door to what’s essentially a book of civic and political history. A dancing auctioneer tells of the city’s birth. The marshal’s gunfight describes the evolution of the American secret ballot. Concrete corncobs highlight racial segregation and the men’s room of a faux-Irish pub broadcasts the decline of American watchdog journalism.

But more than politics, more than history, the purpose of this book is action. Just like I want to connect these airy civic notions to the stone and glass of Chicago street, I want to turn your concern into volunteerism and your care into dollars in the coffers of groups trying to cleanse and strengthen our city, state, and national character. The book’s conclusion lists a few of my favorite organizations and a few ways to help.

So lace up your boots or flick on your reading lamp. The tour is about to begin.

To keep reading, find me a publisher.

A crowd mills about the hasty heptagon of two-by-fours, plywood and Plexiglas enclosing the monster. Photos are taken of the T-shirt wearing scientists slowly lowering a trussed pelvis with a crane-and-pulley system. A Field Museum worker is stationed at the most-natural photo spot, telling half-interested crowds about the process of deconstructing dinos and about Sue’s new home on the second floor.

The enclosure in the middle of the Field Museum’s great hall is full of cases, folding tables, ladders, crates and a dinosaur. The largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered is going away for a bit.

Sue the T. rex — I refuse to oblige the grammatically supect branding that calls it SUE — is getting a room off to the side of the dinosaur room in the Evolving Planet exhibit. The museum set up a viewing window upstairs so you can watch the process there too.

In her place in the hall will be a massive replica of Patagotitan mayorum – think Dino from “The Flintstones” but 122 feet long. I’ll be sad to see Sue go, but kids will be able to touch and play with the replica. Unless you’re employed as a research scientist or trying to look quirky on a first date, kids are really who museums are for, after all.

So the real fossil is getting a room and the great hall is getting a new main attraction.

And on a snow-covered terrace outside, the Brachiosaurus altithorax is wondering why it can’t come back in.

And in a glass box down a downstairs corridor where someone might go if they made a wrong turn to the bathroom, Bushman the gorilla remembers when it was the star.

And in a room of bodies, the Tsavo lions lick their lips at the gawkers and think it’s still better than being a rug.

Of course the critters don’t think like this. The Brachiosaur gazing triumphantly over Lake Shore Drive — occasionally in the uniform of a sports team that’s winning — always was a model, even during the brief four years it strode the great hall. The 93 years cobbled back to lion shape aren’t a better situation for the Man-Eaters of Tsavo than the 25 years they spent as their killer’s floor rugs. They’re still dead.

And I can’t say if Chicago’s first gorilla would register sadness at seeing a life at the zoo capped with a death stuffed and mounted at the museum. I don’t know how apes process death, other than sometimes kittens make Koko sad.

But if there were an exhibit I could check up on, to see how Sue’s ouster makes them feel, it wouldn’t be the mummies or Tully monster, the mounted hyenas or the meteorites. It would be the T. rex that wasn’t. It would be the former great hall resident I marveled at as a kid.

I think the Field downplayed that the Daspletosaurus torosus once in the great hall, now hovering over prey as one of many fossils in the dinosaur exhibit, wasn’t quite a T. rex. It was a tyrannosaur, sure, so they didn’t make a show of correcting people who mistook it for its cousin rex.

I loved that thing. Ran to it as a child to stare at the cold-blooded monster Albertosaurus libratus towering upright in the middle of the hall. They corrected the Albertosaurus misname in 1999 and we now know the upright stance and the cold blood were nonsense (I’m also pro-feathers), but the thrill is still there. Like your first love, ball game or Doctor Whom, your first dino stays with you.

I could talk to it to find out how it feels, of course. I’m a Chicago writer who works in a vaguely journalistic motif. A fake conversation with Daspletosaurus would be no more off-base than Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley or Royko’s Slats Grobnik. If they can have their wise-fool ethnic drunkards as mouthpiece, why can’t I pretend a dinosaur thinks I’m cool?

But I’d rather not make-believe a Cretaceous deathbringer would understand or care about a demotion from the main hall. I wouldn’t want to put commiseration with or schadenfreude for Sue in my monster’s toothy jaws. I don’t need to wonder if it’s cold like the Brachiosaurus or asking itself what the hell happened like a stuffed zoo gorilla.

The tyrannosaur was in the main hall, now it’s not. But it still thrills children and is adored by adults. What more does my monster need to say about Sue than that?

Photos of the deconstruction

Questions for a mummy

The love of a penguin

An art museum in Englewood

And just for fun, the last wood-paved alleys in Chicago

She cast her head around as her dark eyes scanned the room. All eyes were on her sleek form, the swivel and sway in her walk.

And her lateral nasal supraorbital gland used to expel bloodstream salt accumulated through the repeated ingestion of sea water as she pursued her diet of squid, krill and cuttlefish? Dang.

…

Two-and-a-half years ago, I met a penguin. Her name was Mercedes and she loved me, or at least my pants.

I had sprung for a penguin encounter at the Shedd Aquarium as a belated birthday present for my then-girlfriend, now-wife. You and a crowd of children get to go in the Shedd’s back corridors and they bring you giant rubber boots, oodles of dead fish and a Magellanic penguin. Gentle, trainer-monitored stroking of the penguin follows.

Pro-tip: If you ever do this, be sure to be randomly wearing the same color pants as the Shedd penguin-handler uniform. That bird could not get enough of me.

But as pleasant a memory as it was having a penguin repeatedly snub children in favor of me, it was a memory. Over the weekend, my wife and I decided to recreate the experience.

We went to the Shedd to find our bird.

As a non-native of Chicago, I consider all museums, aquaria and other field-trip destinations my purview. I don’t need to maintain the city-dweller’s code of “Never go there until family’s visiting,” so that (and a generous sister who has given me a year membership to a different one the last few Christmases) has kept me a semi-regular visitor to the Field, Adler, Art Institute, Shedd, MSI and other spots usually only seen by yellow buses full of yelling kids and dates of couples still early-on enough they’re trying to look deep.

I love the lofted ceilings, the faux-classical architecture and massive marble pillars used as status for early 20th-century millionaires. I love the squeak of kids’ sneakers on the floor. I love the slight billowy echo among collections so massive even the smallest side object crammed in a corner — painting, fossil, meteorite or bulge-eyed seahorse — would be the centerpiece and talking point of your entire home.

But the city is rife with museums beyond the Big Five. The Oriental Insitute, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Stony Island Arts Bank, the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago History Museum, Chicago Children’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Hull House Museum, Chicago Maritime Museum, Intuit, Perry Mansion, the Money Museum and a dozen dozen more about neighborhoods, niche art, local history, ethnic history and other topics someone loved enough to make these secular temples to.

The Shedd is a gorgeous lakefront building once used as an exterior shot for a clown circus in one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen. The doors open up and you’re in every watery biome on the planet, surrounded by shimmy tropical rays, disturbing deep sea crawlies, lizards, frogs, seahorses, octopodes and quite literally a planet’s worth of fish.

Corridors down take you to the open air tanks where dolphins, otters, belugas and sea lions do their sunlit dances. Corridors down take you to the lower areas where you can see the tank bottoms where the belugas get some me time and the children run amok in a mock yellow submarine. And corridors then take you to the penguin tank to hunt down Mercedes-who-loved-my-pants.

After the penguin encounter two-and-a-half years ago, the children, my now-wife and I were given a card with Mercedes’ color code on it. Each penguin has three beads zip-tied around their flipper so the trainers can tell them apart and, as a side bonus, the encounter kids can come back and track down their penguino. Mercedes’ bead colors were brown-black-blue.

It’s hard to find an artsy, descriptive word for the Shedd’s penguin enclosure that isn’t also literal. The watery tank and mock-stone-beach enclosure was simply swimming with penguins. It was awash with them. It was, in fact, an ocean of penguins.

Magellanics like the girl we sought slipped down a towel-covered slide, dove, swam, waddled on the mock South American stone. Rockhoppers with the twin orange streaks zipping back across their heads like Dagwood Bumstead tapped foot and hopped, hopped, hopped over the way.

Outside the tank, children ran and shrieked “penguin!” in a dozen languages. Pingwin! ¡Pingüino! البطريق طائر!

Among this and through water-splashed glass, we were to spot three small beads in dark, boring colors on one of dozens of identical black-and-white seabirds.

We did.

We found Mercedes.

There wasn’t another moment where the bird looked deep into my soul with those beautiful dark eyes as if to say “Friend?” (I realize she was really saying “Fish?” but let me have this.) She was waddling among her waddling friends, just close enough to one corner of the glass we could spot her beads. She faced the other way most of the time, occasionally craning her neck to look here and there, spot things of interest to cold-water bird. She still had that sway when she took her steps — all penguins do — but this time all eyes weren’t on her, but divvied between the other swimming, waddling, diving, hopping remarkable birds.

Museums are special places, with thousands of paintings, fossils, meteorites or penguins who loved you lodged in a single spot. Any one would be the talking point of your home. Any one will stir your soul if you study it long enough.

Meet a man building an art museum in Englewood

Meet SUE at the Field

Meet Meresamun at the Oriental Institute

Meet an Art Institute ogre lodged by the elevator doors

Meet the Harold Washington robot at the DuSable

Meet Mr. Canoe at the Chicago Maritime Museum

Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

Folding chairs and music stands waited empty by the main hall elephants taxidermied into a death battle, the furniture at alert for the day’s incoming middle- and high-school orchestras from Flint, Michigan; Neosho, Missouri; and Chicago’s South Side.

Sleepy-eyed teenagers with nametags idly straightened books, dino-footed mugs and toys blaring “Chicago,” “Field,” and “Sue” at the various gift shops lying in wait outside the temporary exhibit halls. Older security guards and ticket sellers seemed more vexed than sleepy, annoyed with whatever shift or scheduling manager put them in an empty hall that early on a weekend.

A woman in a Field polo shuffled around an empty Pawnee earth lodge replica, waiting to tell anyone who would come in that they can touch the buffalo-skin rugs.

In the main hall, the growing crowd idly wandered toward a monster. A gum-snapping bro in jeans and a Cubs tracksuit jacket stopped in his tracks when he saw it, a moment of near childlike astonishment before he remembered to be cool. A little girl in her mother’s arms reached out to trace the name on the brass plaque before the monster. An teenage girl’s “Mommmmmm, are you donnnnnnne?” echoed through the empty hall for a few seconds before the teen sheepishly joined her mom in photos with the beast.

It was she of the museum T-shirts, logos, and two separate proprietarily licensed microbrews for sale in the museum bistro (“PseudoSue” pale ale by Toppling Goliath and “Tooth and Claw” dry-hopped lager by Off Color). She of the novelty Twitter account that makes bets with other museums’ showpiece exhibits when their cities’ teams face off against the Cubs or Hawks. Teeth like the Chinese daggers on display a floor up, famous, beloved, and cross-platform branded, the monster behind the plaque was seven tons of bones, rocks and death.

Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex was starting her Sunday too.

The machine whirs and shakes, not enough to cause concern, but just enough to get the excitement going. It’s a giant, familiar console topped with a clear plastic bubble so you can see the gears and valves shift and move and shake.

If it looks like it was designed when people still said “Space Age,” it’s because it was. Mold-A-Ramas have been the same since the 1960s. Same bubble-topped console, same bit of excitement as the two halves of the mold pull apart and a motorized putty knife shoots out to knock my new triceratops off the metal slope, down into a waiting doorway.

My dino’s still tacky to the touch when I grab it. I’m 12 again. I’m 7.

I stand in the Field Museum and smell the dinosaur, just for a moment.

What I just witnessed was “a method wherein a molten thermoplastic material is forced, under pressure, through the cavity of a mold and is then followed by a blast of compressed air which forces the core of molten plastic from the cavity leaving a wall of solidified plastic against the mold surfaces,” according to the patent John “Tike” Miller filed in 1960.

It all started in the ‘50s, the Mold-A-Rama Inc. website states, when one of Tike’s nativity set pieces broke. He wanted a replacement, but only found full sets for sale. Soon, he and his wife had created a little shop in the basement for plaster nativity sets, selling them in department stores.

They expanded, moved into plastic and opened a factory in Quincy, Ill. He then sold to Automatic Retailers of America Inc. and went to work for them creating what would be known as the Mold-A-Rama.

There are two companies that maintain, sell and service Mold-A-Ramas: Mold-A-Rama Inc. (formerly the William A. Jones Co.) here in Illinois and Replication Devices in Florida.

Between the two, they offer a nation plastic dinosaurs, zoo animals, jet fighters, local buildings or even devils, Santas and Dwight D. Eisenhower. You can get Rosa Parks’ bus, Kennedy’s limo, a bat or the U505 submarine from Mold-A-Rama Inc. You can get the Eiffel Tower, a manatee, a corythosaurus or a Russian Soyuz Space Station from Replication Devices.

And, oh yes, Mold-A-Rama Inc. is hiring in case you want to make $12 to $16 an hour repairing and servicing machines around the Chicago area.

It costs six cents to make each statuette, Replication Devices’ website says. Six cents for a memory.

It’s the smell that gets you, takes you back to a place before words, when getting a souvenir meant begging your dad for a dollar and then making roaring dinosaur sounds all the long car ride home.

The little plastic dinosaur I bought last year sits on my bookshelf, next to much fancier knickknacks. I now own artwork, pottery, baseballs signed by Hank Aaron and Ryne Sandberg.

But there’s only one of those pieces I occasionally pick up and give a little sniff.

Read more about prehistoric life

Read about a much fancier plastic statue

Read a Chicago Tribune profile of Mold-A-Rama’s father-and-son repair team

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And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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We were walking between ash-white cabinets on rollers, like the stacks at a university library. A long counter-top ran along the wall across from the stacks. It was inhabited by a few microscopes and a few scientists. One of them was a young woman with short, punky hair. As she adjusted the focus on her microscope, her sleeve drooped to reveal a forearm covered in tattoos.

The Field Museum of Natural History’s Division of Insects contains 4.1 million pinned insects and 8 million specimens or lots of insects and other arthropods in alcohol or on slides, the website says. It’s the fifth-largest collection of Arthropoda (excluding Crustacea) in North America.

From that, the Field found me a beetle the size of a fingernail clipping.

Dr. Margaret Thayer, Ph.D., a curator in the Division of Insects, had met me that morning on the main floor of the Field, by the security desk and Sue the T-Rex.

She had walked me to a glass elevator taking me up to the back areas of this academic Wonka Factory, had walked me down dimly lit and chipped paint hallways, through a maze of rooms and occasional animal skulls, past the wall of varied marked woods from the Department of Botany and finally to a brightly lit room containing ash-white cabinets, half-finished cubicle space and a punk rock entomologist looking through a microscope.

I knew it was the right room before we even opened the door. The smell of naphthalene billowed into the hall.

You know the smell from traditional mothballs, the poisonous ones. I know it from childhood visits to Florida where I would sprint out of my parents’ car after the two days from Illinois toward grandparent hugs, sometimes a cake and the magical room where my grandfather kept photos of rocket launches and his collection of pinned and mounted insects.

Once again, I was running toward my grandfather through a cloud of naphthalene.

From my initial vague description of the fingernail clipping, Collection Manager James Boone had been able to locate the accession record showing the Field received four specimens of it in February 1948 as part of an exchange.

But it wasn’t until my uncle found that magic name “Figulus” in some of my grandfather’s writings that Dr. Thayer could find my little bug, a South Pacific wood-pulp-eating stag beetle named Figulus curvicornis Benesh.

Dr. William R. Rose, my grandfather, discovered it.

“It happened in Luzon, in the Philippines,” my grandfather wrote in his memoirs — Bill Rose was the type of man who wrote his memoirs. “I was writing a letter home when the beast fell on my head. I clawed it off, realized what it was and popped it into a bottle. It is presently in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago.”

I had heard the story a thousand times — Bill Rose was the type of man who re-told stories.

Naphthalene, the National Center for Biotechnology Information website tells me, also goes by the names albocarbon, camphor tar and naphthalin. With a molecular formula of C₁₀H₈ and a molecular weight of 128.17052, it’s a distillate of coal tar.

Insect collectors use naphthalene — moth balls — to keep specimens from being devoured from the outside, Dr. Thayer told me. Before they add a new beetle or other insect to the collection, they freeze it to kill any potential destroyer still living in the dead animal’s guts. They don’t want a parasite eating its way through its host’s pinned corpse to attack the rest of the collection.

Dr. Thayer gestured to the division’s newest freezer as she told me this. It was still in the box.

There had been specimens of Figulus curvicornis Benesh found before my grandfather’s, the 1950 entomological journal Dr. Thayer was kind enough to scan for me said. They had been misnamed or miscategorized, mistakenly identified as other species or given a random title but never described — a nomen nudum, the journal called it. That name wasn’t magic.

My grandfather’s specimens helped Dr. Bernard Benesh realize this was something new. This was Figulus curvicornis Benesh, paratypes provided by “Dr. Wm. Rose, collector.” I would soon see the little red tags that would confirm this honor.

“Alas, this find constitutes my only claim to scientific immortality,” my grandfather wrote. “Goodbye to dreams of having my name rank in the forefront of medicine, along with Pasteur, Fleming and Salk; the name of Rose shall be perpetuated in the annals of science only because I once discovered a little black Figulus beetle.”

From the one stack of 80, Dr. Thayer went to a cabinet. From that cabinet, she pulled a wooden case. At the counter-top table outside the stacks, she opened the case. Inside, were many white cardboard boxes, open on top with pinned beetles inside.

She pulled one small box out, no more than a few inches in length. It had five specimens of a small, black beetle, none longer than a dime.

The beetles were attached to pins, each pin piercing a few slivers of paper with important notes on them.

On one of the notes on the sliver on the pins of the two beetles on the left of a small white box in a case in a cabinet in a stack in a room of stacks down a maze above a museum along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois, someone had written my grandfather’s name.

Dr. Thayer took me to look at my grandfather’s beetle under a microscope. She called it a “scope.”

It looked prehistoric and savage through the scope. It was beautiful.

My grandfather was a brilliant man, a doctor who never let his patients go without care even when they couldn’t pay a dime. He saved lives. He supported his family financially in every way and he loved us as much as he could.

He took a shine to me because we shared the same interests and aptitudes and because I was always so far behind him in these fields. He liked people when they looked up at him.

We would talk about insects and the space program and Pogo by Walt Kelly. I learned about Kurt Vonnegut from him — I still have his copies of “Slapstick” and “Galapagos.” I have his books by explorer William Beebe. And I have his complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories where my grandmother Dorothy had written “Merry Xmas & Happy Sleuthing. Dor. Dec. 1949.”

We both loved Sherlock Holmes, a man considered better than everyone else because he was so godawful smart. That says a lot about my grandfather. I don’t know what that says about me.

He supported me in everything I ever did, but he always let me know he could have done it better. If I talked about the newspaper where I worked, he would puff up about his time on the high school paper. If my mother talked about her MFA, he would take credit because he liked to doodle. Our successes were reflections on him. We were mirrors for his countenance.

Even his kindness was inept and mean. He told me “Birth is 100 percent fatal” by phone while I was at the hospital waiting for my other grandfather to die. He meant it to be comforting.

But he was trying to comfort me.

He comforted me over a breakup once in a conversation where he forgot my name. I was used to that by then. That’s the hard part of it all. He devoted his life to expanding that strange, glowing mind of his only to have life take that mind right back. Here’s where the story cuts off. Here’s where you get no more.

Things look savage and beautiful when viewed through a scope.

I can’t take these complicated, conflicted feelings of love and resentment and put them away in a little box, put that box in a case and turn the crank to make it disappear in stacks and stacks of other little boxes. They won’t be held. They thicken and infuse the air I breathe. They’re part of me, these warm memories of astringency where a whiff of poison feels like home.

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