Earth's land masses have drifted together and apart over 

 the eons. From such evidence, researchers like Flynn and 

 Lance Grande, associate curator of fossil fishes, are able 

 to track relationships among species that the current con- 

 figuration of the continents and oceans could not possibly 

 support. 



Biochemistry 



First-rate research in evolutionary biology is often depen- 

 dent on biochemical analysis. Currently, most biochemi- 

 cal work by Museum staff and gradute students uses the 

 technique of starch-gel electrophoresis. The state of the 

 art, however, is more advanced, and ornithologist Scott 

 Lanyon, who coordinates the Museum's biochemical sys- 

 tematics laboratories, hopes soon to acquire the full array 

 of futuristic technology: mitochondrial and nuclear DNA 

 sequencing, polymerase chain reaction amplification of 

 DNA sequences, DNA fingerprinting, and DNAxDNA 

 hybridization. 



Ethnology and Archaeology 



Civilizations come and civilizations go, beneficiaries or 

 victims of climatic change, technological development, 

 pestilence, and war. Aboriginal cultures in the modern 

 world coexist uneasily with Western civilization, and are 

 defeated entirely with the loss of wilderness. Preserving 

 the arts and artifacts of cultures living and dead is vital to 

 understanding what links us to our fellows and our ances- 

 tors, and all of us to the living Earth. 



The Museum's vast and growing collections in 

 anthropology — more than 600,000 items — thus are the 

 centerpieces of its major exhibits, and conserving them is 

 among the Museum's most important functions. Head of 

 Conservation Catherine Sease took a major step forward 

 in this field in June 1987, when she was preparing for the 

 opening of the new Webber Hall. Sease helped develop 

 relative-humidity modules for exhibit cases, technology 

 that eliminates the need to climate-control entire halls. The 

 Field Museum is the first institution in the U.S. to make 



Catherine Sease, head of Anthropology's Conservation Division, and Christine Del Re, associate conservator, together with Egyptology 

 consultant Frank Yurco, exannine one of 23 mummies subsequently placed on view in the new Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit. "The visible 

 side of conservation," observes Sease," is the work we do for exhibits, but that concerns roughly 1 percent of the Anthropology col- 

 lections. The remainder of our holdings require both preventive care and treatment too. Conservation at Field tvluseum is expanding to 

 be able to meet these various needs." 



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