Field Museum

The ultimate “I was born in the wrong generation.” 🧓

While we tend to picture our favorite dinosaurs roaming the Earth together like they do in the movies, many of them never actually shared the planet. 🌎

In fact, some were separated by tens of millions of years! ⏰

While iconic fossils like Stegosaurus and T. rex are often displayed in the same museum halls, that’s the only place they’ve ever been seen together. Their time on Earth was separated by more than 80 MILLION YEARS. 🦖

That’s an even longer stretch of time than the 67 million years between you and SUE. 🧍

Archaeopteryx: ar-key-AHP-ter-icks 🗣️

At around 150 million years old, Archaeopteryx is Earth's earliest known bird. 🐦

While it may not be as big as SUE, this little fossil is a superstar in its own right. The Chicago Archaeopteryx is one of just 14 specimens ever discovered and helps us understand the connection between the dinosaurs and the modern birds that fly overhead today. 🦖

Over the course of 1,300 hours, our team of expert preparators painstakingly freed its fragile bones and feather impressions from the surrounding limestone. 🪨

All that hard work paid off, though; the Chicago Archaeopteryx fossil preserves details not found in any other Archaeopteryx specimen, including skin impressions and tiny skull bones. 🦴

🎨 : Ville Sinkkonen