Most visitors to a natural history museum see only a sliver of what it holds. At the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the objects on display are a tiny percentage of the total collection, with experts caring behind the scenes for 26 million specimens. A new exhibition called ‘Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries,’ brings some of the rarest, oldest and most beautiful of them into public view, many for the first time. From a dodo skeleton to jewel-like beetles, the objects span billions of years and show how scientists still use these old collections to study life on Earth.
What the exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History shows and when you can visit
The exhibition, ‘Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries’ opened on 27 June 2026 and runs through April 2027 in the museum’s main gallery space. It is a collaboration between the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the university’s three natural history research museums, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum. The show draws on a collection of more than 26 million individual objects, and the Harvard Gazette reports that it is open daily from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. Specimens range from stone and bone to plant, animal, feather, fish and fossil, from a massive polar bear to tiny beetles.
The dodo skeleton, the extinct golden toad and a 300-million-year-old fern at Harvard
Several specimens no longer exist in the wild. The dodo, whose last widely accepted sighting was in 1662, appears as a whole articulated skeleton; it was last displayed nearly twenty years ago, alongside a feathered model. Visitors can also see the golden toad, discovered in 1964 in Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and declared extinct in 2004. Ornithology collection manager Jeremiah Trimble explains that such specimens preserve a snapshot of a species and its location, letting researchers trace how its genetics changed over time. A 300-million-year-old fern tells another story, ferns and other prehistoric plants were buried and pressed over millions of years into the coal that fuelled the Industrial Revolution.
Image: Left/Pearl oyster with pearlfish/Right/Coconut crab/Stephanie Mitchell
George Washington’s pheasants, a skull linked to King Kong and a butterfly unique wings
Some objects arrive with extraordinary stories. George Washington’s golden pheasants once lived in the aviary of Louis XVI before the Marquis de Lafayette sent them to Washington in November 1786; after they died, he gave them to Charles Wilson Peale, who ran a Philadelphia museum. A Komodo dragon skull is said to come from the 1926 expedition that inspired the film, King Kong. An oyster from around 1856 holds a pearlfish mummified in mother of pearl. A blue morpho butterfly shows male markings on one wing and female markings on the other, a trait said to occur in only one in 10,000 butterflies.
How scientists still study life across billions of years with old specimens
Beauty and research often overlap, as in this case, a rare form of crystalline gold looks like metallic coral, and a fossil slab from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains preserves swirling patterns left by cephalopods that swam in a shallow sea around 370 million years ago. Beetles and weevils owe their metallic shine to crystalline scales, which society women of the mid-1800s used like sequins. Notably, a fully articulated polar bear, in the collection since at least 1878, is still used as a research tool. Genetic material from its skin informs scientists about population diversity, while stable isotopes in its fur reveal ecological conditions during its life. Michaela Schmull, curator of ferns, says, “Discovering the stories is one of the best jobs.”
