Saturday, August 22, 2020

Natural History Tiles at Roosevelt Station


While visiting Chicago, Illinois, USA, I traveled from Midway Airport to the Roosevelt station via the Orange "L" line. The "L" stands for elevated as in the tracks are high above the street. It is operated by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). The address of the station is 1167 South State Street, Chicago, Illinois 60605.

The Roosevelt Station is the closest to the Museum Campus where the Field Museum of Natural History can be found. Because of its locality, tile artwork in one of the passenger walk ways are decorated in a natural history theme.

The first image depicts a trilobite, if I had to guess it is a Silurian Period Calymene. Chicago is built on a 420 million year old Silurian Period seabed so this would be a good choice to show. The border tile in yelllow, black and gray show animals as well. The one on the left appears to show a Permian Period tetrapod Discosauriscus. While the one on the right shows a crinoid calyx with part of its stem.

On the opposite wall is tile shows what I think to be is a brachiopod.



The next image shows a Permian Period Dimetrodon (the fossil of one can be seen at the Field Museum of Natural History in the Evolving Planet exhibit). The smaller tiles from left to right show a straight conical shelled cephalopod, a Silurian Period sea scorpion Eurypterid, and maybe a crinoid column section.




At one end of the walkway is an image representing a human in a form similar to Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man artwork from 1490. The smaller tiles represent on the left a snail (reminds be of a Turritella or Loxoplocus fossil) and the right a standing bird (reminds me of a Dodo). The human figure seems to represent current time of where our natural world is at.

At the opposite end of the walkway, the tile shows the Big Bang or the beginning of our known natural world.