Field Museum Holds Its First-Ever Identification Day

(CBS) -- It was a "show and tell" day at the Field Museum Saturday. People brought their rocks, plants and bugs to show, so experts could tell them what they had.

People brought rocks in sacks, bugs in jars and and photos on phones. Some also came with pre-conceived notions. Many, for instance, refused to "pet" the Madagascar hissing cockroaches at the insect table.

"They'll bit me in the head," said Aaron, a four-year-old.

His five-year-old brother Nathan agreed.

"They will make you scared and bite you," he warned. But Field Museum Assistant Collections Manager Rebekah Baquiran said both boys, and many others, blamed the hissing cockroaches for what its cousins can do.

"(Other) insects get a bad rap from the notorious ones, especially when people have learned the social stigmas that go along with bad spiders, bad cockroaches and mean bees," she said.

She said there "is so much more" to insects.

The museum's curator for spiders and millipedes, Petra Sierwald, said spiders help keep the population of mosquitoes down and with rare exceptions in the Chicago area, are helpful and not a danger.

Baquiran said poisonous brown recluse spiders generally are not found within a couple hundred miles of Chicago, but said some have recently turned up in area warehouses.

A number of people brought in rocks, thinking that they could be fragments from meteorites. Surya Rout, a post-doctoral fellow at Field Museum, said that almost without exception they were pieces of iron slag or the coal byproduct coke.

Museum spokesperson Emily Waldren said there was always the hope that someone would bring in a real find to its first-ever Identification Day, but she said identifying common species and telling how they fit into everyday life is part of the fun of such an event.