Hidden Away With Reptiles For Decades, Field Museum Hyenas Get New Exhibit
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Something old is something new again at the Field Museum; and four striped hyenas are now in a better, more informative setting.
The hyenas had been on display for decades in an unremarkable box in the Hall of Reptiles. They had been prepared for exhibition in 1896 by a pioneer of taxidermy, Carl Akeley, who worked at the Field Museum and was on the expedition to Africa when they were killed.
"The idea that we would have these striped hyenas created by this mega-taxidermist off-display is the equivalent of having a fine work of art, like a Picasso, in your grandmother's attic," said Field Museum chief curiosity officer Emily Graslie.
She came up with the idea of having an Indigogo online fundraising campaign, and last spring raised more than $155,000 in six weeks to pay for the new exhibit in the Hall of Asian Mammals.
Graslie said the donations came from more than 1,500 donors from all over the world.
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Curator of mammals Larry Heaney agreed it didn't make much sense to have the hyenas on display in the Hall of Reptiles.
As for the new exhibit, Heaney said it's a remarkable recreation of the expedition on which the hyenas were killed in Somalia.
"In the hyena diorama, if you look at the sky, the position of the stars, the position of the moon, the position of where the sun is rising is exactly as it was at 5:40 on Aug. 6, 1896," he said.
Heaney said, although the hyenas were found in Africa, they're now on display in the Hall of Asian Mammals because the same variety of hyenas can be found in India, too.
It was decided to keep an African scene in order to be true to what the Field Museum had done with the other exhibits, as precisely as possible recreating the habitat where those animals actually lived.
