Move over, Sue: World's largest dinosaur taking center stage at Field Museum[[ "Visitors to the Field Museum early next year will be in for a shock: For the first time in almost two decades, Sue, the museum’s star attraction and the largest, most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, will not be on display in the museum’s central hallway. Beginning with her dismantling in February, the apex predator and apex museum specimen is being kicked upstairs in favor of a dinosaur much bigger and much more recently discovered — the world’s largest, in fact, the Patagotitan mayorum, a plant eater unearthed in South America in 2014. “We have this tremendous hall that sort of dwarfs everything, even Sue,” said Peter Makovicky, the museum’s associate curator of dinosaurs. “You pretty much have two options: You either get a blue whale or you get the biggest dinosaur in the world.” The Sue skeleton will move upstairs to a new exhibit being constructed especially for her, the museum will announce Wednesday, and Stanley Field Hall will host a cast of the titanosaur that will stretch 122 feet from head to toe, more than three times Sue’s length and almost 7 times her bulk, and stand two stories tall. Because it is a cast — the second full skeleton to be displayed in the world, following one that went up last year at New York’s American Museum of Natural History — visitors will be able to walk under it, to touch it, to reach way up and caress the animal maybe just above the knee. The introduction of a new potential museum star, and the recasting of the current one, are occurring to mark the 125th anniversary of the museum in 2018. Paying for it is a $16.5 million gift from Chicago billionaire Kenneth Griffin, which the Field calls “one of the largest private contributions ever to a Chicago museum,” designed to help emphasize the museum’s status as a first-rate dinosaur destination. But moving Sue could jolt a public that has grown accustomed to that menacing face. Chicagoans aren’t always so keen on alterations to the norm. Size is sexy, but so is ferocity. Sue, as a top carnivore, has always had a special magnetism. But museums are not immune to the challenge of the theme park, where each year demands a new roller coaster. “It’s a radical change that people will initially have a strong reaction to, and I think that’s good,” said Jaap Hoogstraten, the museum’s director of exhibits. He emphasized that Stanley Field Hall has had a variety of personas through the years: There’s been a fountain there, there’ve been rows of animal specimens in wood-and-glass cases, there was, immediately before Sue, the 75-foot brachiosaur skeleton cast, a smaller titanosaur and one discovered many decades earlier, that is now out on the museum’s northwest terrace. The brachiosaur “got knocked out of Stanley Field Hall by Sue,” said William Simpson, a Field paleontologist and its head of collections. “I think that’s a smart thing they’re going to do,” said Pete Larson, who was part of the group of fossil hunters that originally discovered Sue, a 90-percent complete fossil, in 1990 in the Black Hills of South Dakota. “Moving her to a smaller hall will really emphasize her size. She’s a huge dinosaur, but because the room is so large she’s kind of dwarfed in it. I also think this will give them a better venue to tell her story in more detail.” Plus, time and science march on, said Larson, president of the Black Hills Geological Research Institute in Hill City, S.D., and Sue’s continuing celebrity status can be used to boost visitorship to her new home, the “Evolving Planet” exhibit that tells the story of life on Earth and is already the museum’s most popular permanent exhibition." ]]
