Jurassic Oceans exhibition coming to the Field Museum

Dinosaurs from the Earth's Jurassic seas will be the focus of a new exhibit coming to the Field Museum on February 25, 2022. The exhibition, Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep, which was produced and curated by London’s Natural History Museum, will introduce visitors to the underwater giants that lived 200 million years ago. These include a true-to-life replica of a sleek, speedy reptile called an ichthyosaur and the skeleton of a long-necked plesiosaur. Visitors will be able to get up close with a fossilized tail of one of the biggest fish ever discovered: Leedsichthys, a thirty-foot-long giant that cruised near the surface of the sea catching thousands of microscopic plankton.

The show will feature over 100 fossils and models ranging from giant marine reptiles that looked like real-life versions of the Loch Ness Monster to small, strange starfish cousins called sea lilies. Visitors will come face-to-face with marine predators and other friendly marine life of the Jurassic seas through real fossils and CGI projections.

“We’re excited to showcase these amazing encounters and let visitors experience the incredible diversity of the Jurassic oceans,” says Emily Parr, the exhibition’s project manager. The public will be able to touch real fossils of shelled creatures from the Jurassic, feel the textures of replicated sea creature skins, and explore the features of marine reptiles on interactive touchscreens.

(Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep will be presented with bilingual text in English and Spanish and will run until September 5. Read more about the exhibition here.)