Field Museum of Natural History

Sue, one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever found, is the Field Museum's best-known resident and the reason many visitors come. She sits within a broad natural history museum that draws more than a million visitors a year to its galleries of fossils, animals, gems and human cultures.

Beyond the dinosaurs, the museum is known for the Tsavo lions, the pair blamed for killing railway workers in Kenya in 1898, and for its Ancient Egypt galleries, which include a walk-through tomb built around chambers from a real mastaba. A full-size Pawnee earth lodge, a hall of gems and extensive animal dioramas round out the permanent displays.

The museum was founded in 1893 after the World's Columbian Exposition and named for its early benefactor, the merchant Marshall Field. Its marble neoclassical building on the lakefront opened in 1921 and shares the Museum Campus with the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. The collections are large enough to fill most of a day, and they suit families and dinosaur enthusiasts especially well.