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If there were some way to tell her, the late Edith Rockefeller McCormick almost certainly would be proud to know that the poop of every Southern hairy-nosed wombat living in North America is sent on a regular basis to Brookfield Zoo.

McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller, who married into the McCormick reaper fortune, in 1919 offered to give the Cook County Forest Preserve District 83 acres near suburban Riverside with stipulations. The land had to be used to build the most modern zoo in the world, one based on the design of barless zoos she had visited in Europe, and the zoo must do research on its animals that would enhance knowledge of "the human soul."

It took 15 years, but the zoo was built. On Wednesday, Brookfield Zoo celebrates the 75th anniversary of its opening in 1934. And though wombat poop might not reveal much about the human soul, Brookfield's commitment to studying it says a lot about how both it and zoos in general have evolved.

The zoo has been an enormously popular entertainment and educational attraction, pulling in 2 million visitors a year. But it also has been a pioneer in research and conservation, dedicated to protecting the well-being of its animals and of animals in the world's disappearing wilderness areas.

A good example is its work with hairy-nosed wombats -- a rare, lumbering, somehow lovable animal that started to go extinct in wide areas of Australia after 19th Century ranchers set their herds of sheep loose on the semiarid plains, destroying the native vegetation wombats live on.

In 1969, Brookfield got its first Southern hairy-nosed wombats, and in 1971 it bought a 20-square-mile sheep ranch in Australia, fencing it off from sheep. The native plants came back and so did the wombats, helping inspire creation of the 2,400-square mile Murray-Sunset National Park of restored habitat.

Brookfield has four hairy-nosed wombats, including a 34-year-old that is the oldest documented wombat in the world.

The zoo also has wombat poop from four other North American zoos shipped monthly to its endocrinology laboratory, which studies hormone levels in the droppings of hundreds of exotic species to chart their reproductive cycles. This information is crucial to captive and wild breeding.

"When it was new, Brookfield was the most cutting-edge zoo in America for many years," said William Conway, retired chief of New York's Wildlife Conservation Society, and unofficial emeritus dean of American zookeepers.

"It is quite a remarkable place -- in many ways the model of how zoos developed in the 20th Century and where they are headed in the 21st."

What set it apart from American zoos was its naturalistic outdoor exhibits that had no bars or fences -- the feature McCormick admired. It separated animals from the viewing public by moats.

Brookfield opened with animals that largely remain zoo staples today -- elephants, giraffes, zebras, lions and penguins -- and was an instant success. Few families then owned cars, so zoo patrons had to get to Brookfield on public transportation -- including an electric trolley line that used to run past the zoo's south entrance -- but in the first year the zoo set attendance records that have never been broken.

"There were 58,000 people here one day in 1934," said Stuart Strahl, the zoo's president since 2003. "If we had 30,000 people in one day now it would just overwhelm us."

Spread over 216 acres like an elegant formal European park with grand concourses and malls lined with Italianate buildings, the zoo is a landmark and memory factory, the place that gave Americans their first look ever at many species, from pandas in 1937 to more obscure beasts like wombats and okapis.

In 1961 it opened the world's first inland dolphin exhibit. In 1982 it opened Tropic World, the first immersion rain forest exhibit, letting multiple species share the living spaces. The exhibit inspired many others, like The Swamp and The Living Coast.

By the 1950s zoos began to realize that the world's wilderness areas were being decimated at an accelerating rate because of pressures from human population growth. And as a result, the animals in those habitats were in peril.

All responsible zoos began to recalibrate, working to extend the lives of their animals with better husbandry and to replace animals with improved captive breeding. Brookfield often has led in these trends, thanks to its first research curator, George Rabb, a young biologist hired in 1956. He was only the second PhD to work full time in any zoo.

Rabb soon had area university scientists using the zoo as a research facility. By 1975 he was head of the zoo and built up its research staff, which today totals nine PhDs. Some go far beyond the zoo gates, studying wild animals all over the world. Others are doing pioneering work in fields like zoo nutrition and genetics.

"I encouraged the study of genetics of populations we were keeping in zoos because of the dangers of inbreeding in small, related groups," said Rabb, now retired.

Those studies have developed techniques that allow cooperating zoos to transfer animals back and forth as they determine ideal genetic matches to avoid inbreeding.

Ironically, wildlife managers now need those same skills.

Human activity has shrunk and isolated most of the world's remaining terrestrial wilderness areas so severely that animals have been cut off from traditional breeding migration routes, raising the specter of inbreeding in their isolation.

"Those are the problems zoo people already know a great deal about," Strahl said, noting that zoo geneticists increasingly use their skills on wild populations.

Many people, he said, mistakenly think the future role of zoos will be to preserve species in zoos before they go extinct in the wild.

"There aren't enough zoos to do that," he said, "and not enough space and resources in zoos."

Instead, Strahl said, zoos increasingly will have to enlist the public to help with preserving wilderness and wild animals, and looks to an exhibit, Great Bear Wilderness, that Brookfield will open in 2010 as a model.

Spread over 6 acres, it will feature the zoo's Alaskan brown and polar bears in naturalistic settings. It also will have some animals -- bald eagles, bison and Mexican wolves -- that nearly went extinct but have been making a comeback because of conservation efforts.

"There are many conservation success stories that we shouldn't ignore," Strahl said. "We spend a lot of time teaching dire lessons about habitat destruction and threats of extinction, but we need also to focus on success. If a species is endangered, we need to talk about what do we do to get it back. I fear people become weary of the problem if they never see the possibility of a solution.

"For too long we have probably led people to think that the government or conservation organizations will save nature. We want to give our visitors the ability to make decisions in their own lives that might affect wild places."

wmullen@tribune.com