Stones and Bones

Paleontology Program for Pre-College Students

This course is currently at capacity and we are no longer accepting applications during the Extended deadline.

Join the Field Museum for a four-week intensive practicum in paleontology in Chicago and Wyoming. Go into the field and behind the scenes at the Field Museum to learn how fossils are collected, analyzed, and conserved, as you work alongside museum scientists in the lab and in the field. Stones and Bones gives you a unique opportunity to participate in the paleontological study carried out by the museum.

Program Description

The Field Museum is considered one of the finest natural history museums in the world, with top-notch collections and a strong research team. The museum exhibits a wide range of prehistoric life, from dinosaurs like the famous T.Rex., "Sue," to early mammals, birds, and fish. It is one of the few museums in the world to maintain regular fossil-hunting expeditions in search of prehistoric remains. The program takes place in both Chicago and Wyoming so students get firsthand experience in the extraction and preparation of fossils critical for paleontological study.

In Chicago, University of Chicago and Field Museum scientists will take you into the labs and galleries where they work and study as they introduce important concepts in geology, paleontological methods, stratigraphy, and earth history. Learn about basic techniques for the study of evolutionary biology including comparative skeletal anatomy of fishes and other freshwater animals. You will examine methodological concepts such as fossil preparation, illustration, and description. Through this, you will acquire the fundamental scientific background needed to discover and understand the significance of fossils in the field.

In Wyoming, experience what life in the field is all about when you join the ongoing Field Museum expedition in the Green River Formation. This site is one of the world's most productive fossil sites and contains an entire 52 million-year-old community of extinct organisms. Previous expeditions to the Green River Formation have led Field scientists and his team to uncover thousands of fossils, including plants, insects, mammals, crocodiles, birds, lizards, turtles, and fishes, many of which are currently on display at the museum. Spend your mornings and late afternoon digging for fossils from the Cenozoic Period and interpret them in a way that allows you to incorporate fossils into studies of living animals and plants. In the early afternoon and evenings, you can go into town for provisions, help prepare meals for your fellow diggers, and sit around the campfire with the museum's researchers and their families. 

Upon your return to Chicago, you will conserve, catalog, and analyze your new discoveries in the museum's preparation labs, using the same techniques and equipment that the museum's own staff uses. By the end of the program, you will have completed the full cycle of study and preparation of specimens for paleontological research.