Archaeopteryx is one of Field Museum’s greatest-ever acquisitions

CHICAGO - The Field Museum on Monday unveiled its Archaeopteryx, one of only about a dozen such specimens ever found and the only one housed in a "major natural history museum in the Western Hemisphere."

It’s a relatively tiny fossil. Even so, Julian Siggers, the Field’s president and CEO, has called the Archaeopteryx the museum’s "most significant fossil acquisition since Sue, the T. rex." The fossil specimen arrived in Chicago in 2022.

Archaeopteryx, pronounced ar-key-AHP-ter-icks, are a bird-like, holy grail creature of sorts that, when first discovered in 1861, helped prove Charles Darwin’s then-controversial Theory of Evolution. They lived about 150 million years ago, a dinosaur with feathers, hollow bones, tiny teeth and clawed wings. Much about its lifestyle remains unknown. Could it fly? Perhaps, but not very well, Field scientists say. And it was small too — the Field’s specimen is about the size of a pigeon.

In the 19th century, some saw Archaeopteryx remains and couldn’t figure out what it was, with some thinking it might be an angel, according to London’s Natural History Museum.

The first specimen was discovered just two years after the publication of Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species." A lot of people at the time didn’t believe that animals could evolve. The Archaeopteryx appeared to prove otherwise — that dinosaurs had evolved into birds.

All of the specimens to date have been found embedded in a limestone quarry in southern Germany. Millions of years ago, the land was quite different — a large, tropical lagoon surrounded by sub-tropical islands.

A private fossil collector found the Field’s specimen some time before 1990, according to the museum. It then remained in private hands before coming to Chicago.