Hey there, friends, and welcome to episode 32 of Just the Zoo of Us. This week, I am joined by

a power couple from the Field Museum here to talk about the intersection of science, history,

and of course, birds in a love letter to the Natural History Museum. We discuss working

alongside Sue the T-Rex, specimen pickles, harlequin romance novels, and explore

bigger questions like how museum collections can reveal evolution happening around us right now in

real time and help us look into the future, what the average everyday person can learn about

themselves, and what science actually looks like from a museum, and the hotly

contested debate as to whether gray vireos are interesting or not.

Just the Zoo of Us presents the Bird Hall with Shannon Hackett and John Bates.

Music Thanks. I'm Hi there, everybody, it's Ellen Weatherford with Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast.

I'm very excited this week.

I have not one, but two brand new friends to bring to you today that I'm so excited to talk about because y'all are coming to us from one of my like

bucket list dream places that I really, I'm actually planning on going next year. So hopefully

we'll get to see you guys when I come there next year coming Coming from the Field Museum in Chicago, we have John Bates and Shannon Hackett. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I am so excited to talk to y'all. I mean it when I say like the Field Museum is like, it's been on my list for a while since I learned about Sue. Do you all get get to, your coworkers with Sue, basically. That's your

colleague, right? Yeah. Yeah. We were here when Sue was, when Sue came into the museum.

Oh, you got, you were like onboarding Sue. That's, yeah, actually, we're old. We're doing this for a long

time. But, yeah, that's the arrival of Sue is a really dramatic and I think

kind of a transformational time in our institution. It's the first time the museum paid that

kind of money for something. But the way Sue is prepared is really different. So she was prepared in a way that every bone, or most of them at

least, can be taken out individually so that there's this skeletal framework thing, kind of a cage

that attaches the bones so that if you're a researcher, you can come and say, well, I want to

study the rib bones of this T-Rex and they can

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