CHICAGO 

 NATURAL 

 HISTORY 

 MUSEUM 



MUSEUM NEWS 



This Month's 

 Cover 



X he Hallowe'en-like masks on the 

 cover were made and worn by Iroquois 

 Indians. When first discovered by Eu- 

 ropeans, the Iroquois occupied the lake 

 region and Mohawk Valley of northern 

 New York, a fertile territory of consid- 

 erable size. The five Iroquois nations, 

 or tribes, were Seneca, Cayuga, Onon- 

 daga, Mohawk, and Oneida. The In- 

 dians who made and used these wooden 

 masks were all members of the False 

 Face Society. 



The False Face Society was the most 

 illustrious of a number of Iroquois secret 

 societies that treated disease by spiri- 

 tual means. This society also knew how 

 to appease the horrible Flying Heads, 

 evil demons without limbs or bodies 

 that were believed to haunt the forests 

 and send disease to the Iroquois. 



In addition to the masks the proper- 

 ties of the False Face Society were songs, 

 dances, elaborate rituals, charms, and 

 musical instruments, including rattles 

 made of turtle shells. 



Membership in the False Face Soci- 

 ety was open to men and women, and 

 was achieved by dreaming of the neces- 

 sity of joining or by having been cured 

 of illness by the Society. 



These masks and other cultural at- 

 tributes of the Iroquois Indians as they 

 were about a hundred years ago are 

 on exhibit in Hall 5, on the main floor 

 of the Museum. 



Smallest Beetles 

 to be Studied 



A he National Science Foundation has 

 given Chicago Natural History Museum 

 a grant of 515,900 for two years to sup- 



Page U OCTOBER 



port research by Henry Dybas, Associate 

 Curator of Insects, on the classification 

 of North American featherwing beetles. 

 These beetles are among the smallest in- 

 sects known. A dozen of the tiniest of 

 these creatures could rest quite easily on 

 the head of an ordinary straight pin. 



Featherwing beetles are common in 

 many moist situations. There may be 

 several hundred, for instance, in one 

 square yard of forest floor; yet they are 

 so tiny that many entomologists have 

 never seen one. Completely unknown 

 species are still turning up in such well- 

 collected regions as the Chicago area. 



Curator Dybas collects featherwing beetles 

 from fungi in Panama. 



The group has received little study in 

 the past, in spite of the fact that feather- 

 wings are of interest to ecologists and 

 soil biologists, as well as entomologists. 

 Featherwing beedes illustrate some 

 special biological problems in a par- 

 ticularly instructive way. Prominent 

 among these are problems associated 

 with small size. Some featherwings are 



less than 1 /75th of an inch long, which is 

 smaller than some single-celled organ- 

 isms. How can so much complexity and 

 organization be packed into such a tiny 

 space? As bits of biological machinery 

 these beetles are miniaturized beyond 

 the wildest dreams of space engineers. 



The current study is intended to es- 

 tablish the basic classification needed for 

 further work on problems connected 

 with these smallest of beetles. Most of 

 the financial support will be for techni- 

 cal assistance in making microscope slide 

 preparations needed to study the tiny 

 insects. 



Field Work 



on 



Ancient Climates 



D* 



'r. john clark, Associate Curator of 

 Sedimentary Petrology, and his assist- 

 ant, Kenneth Kietzke, returned recently 

 from six eventful weeks in the Badlands 

 of South Dakota. They brought back 

 to the Museum a collection of rock sam- 

 ples, petrified palm wood, fossil alligator 

 bones, and other fossils, which will be 

 most helpful in interpreting ancient cli- 

 mates. (Dr. Clark reviewed his inter- 

 pretations in the Bulletins of February 

 and March, 1964.) 



The climate of 1 964 was not quite so 

 helpful to the researchers as their col- 

 lecting, however. A succession of vio- 

 lent storms immobilized their Power 

 Wagon for a week, far out in the Bad- 

 lands; lightning struck within fifty feet 

 of their camp on several occasions. For- 

 tunately, as a result of the storms, mud 

 from the gullies was washed out and de- 

 posited in much the same fashion as oc- 

 curred thirty million years ago; thus the 

 beleaguered campers were able to ob- 

 serve "ancient" stream deposition at first 

 hand.  



