I'm sitting here in Stanley Field Hall in the Field Museum of Natural History.

It is one of the largest natural history museums in the United States.

It has twenty-four million artifacts, one hundred and fifty-seven thousand examples of fungi, mammals from one hundred and ninety different countries, twenty-one thousand clutches of bird eggs, one million specimens of rove beetles,

representing seven thousand different species, and thirty thousand different fish fossils.

Right now I'm going to take you guys on a tour of some of the public exhibits

that you can see if you come visit the Field Museum.

Let's go!

I'm sitting here in the Hall of Mammals, surrounded by dozens of full-mount taxidermy dioramas

of every mammal species you can imagine from every corner of the globe possible.

The Field Museum has a large collection of invertebrates -- more than 2.4 million specimens,

and a large portion of those are insects.

Part of The Brain Scoop's relocation means that we're going to be branching out

and talking about all different aspects of natural history,

including things like anthropology.

We're going to be talking about Africa!

Ancient Americas!

Ancient Egypt!

Asia!

Botany!

Plants of the world!

All of the plants in this hall are made by hand; they're made out of wax!

We've got dinosaurs!

Early hominids!

Ice-age mammals!

Meteorites!

The Grainger Hall of Gems!

The Elizabeth Hubert Malott Hall of Jades!

Award-winning bathrooms!

This is the DNA lab where they analyze the genetic data from thousands of different species!

This is Richard Lariviere.

He's the president.

Hello.

And that's just a tiny fraction of the things that belong to the Field Museum's immense collection.

At any one time they only have less than one percent of all of their artifacts on public display.

And I am so thrilled to be able to go behind the scenes

and share some of these artifacts with you guys

in the coming days, weeks, months...

years.

This has been an episode of The Brain Scoop,

thanks for watching.