Where can you find the most famous squirrel in Champaign-Urbana?
Pinto Bean, an Eastern gray squirrel with distinctive and rare piebald coloring, was a well-known inhabitant of the University of Illinois campus. However, it met an untimely end in October 2022 in a presumed auto accident. The squirrel was mourned by its many human fans, receiving a halftime Jumbotron tribute at a football game as well as its very own wikipedia entry.
Thanks to the magic of taxidermy, Pinto Bean lives on in perpetuity in the lobby of the Forbes Natural History Building (1816 S. Oak Street, Champaign), where it has occupied a lit display case since the spring of 2023.
Pinto Bean has joined a variety of other natural history specimens, models, and artworks on display in the lobby of the Forbes Natural History Building, which is well worth a visit if you have young zoology enthusiasts in your family.
Located in the University of Illinois Research Park (south and west of the main campus), the Forbes building was completed in 2001. It currently houses offices and lab spaces of the Illinois Natural History Survey and the Prairie Research Institute Center for Paleontology, among others.
Those readers who have spent time on the University of Illinois campus might be scratching their heads right about now, because they may be more familiar with another, more famous Natural History Building. The OG building by that name is located on the Main Quad (at 1301 W. Green St., Urbana) — it dates from 1892, was designed by Nathan Ricker, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. And in fact, that older building hosted and displayed the natural history exhibits and collections owned by the university until the beginning of the 21st century, when the collections were dispersed across the campus and across the state.
The most well-known historical resident of the Natural History Building on the Quad might be this young American bison, dating from the 1870’s. It moved over to its present location in the Forbes Natural History Building lobby in 2001.
Plans had been in the works since as far back as 1892 to build a Natural History Museum at the University of Illinois, but these plans never came to fruition. When the university finally dismantled most of its natural history holdings in 2001, its collections found new homes either on campus — in other research units, at the Illinois Natural History Survey, at the newly constructed Spurlock Museum of World Cultures (opened in 2002) — or farther afield, such as at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.
Traces of the campus’s natural history past remain in the lobby of the Forbes Natural History Building and can be visited by the public when the building is open — metered parking is available adjacent to the building and the space is uncrowded and peaceful. Of course, the lobby is part of a university workplace, so remind your more rambunctious children about indoor voices and looking with their eyes before visiting.
A quick visit to the Forbes Natural History Building lobby makes a great practice run for a future, more expensive expedition to the Field Museum in Chicago. You can see if the natural items on display in the lobby — including songbirds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and a great horned owl, along the bison and at least one other squirrel besides Pinto Bean (see if you can find it!) — hold your child’s interest.
Or at the very least, you can have a great discussion about dung beetles and exactly what it is that they’re rolling up.
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