"We have a little bit of everything," says assistant curator Felicita C. D'Escrivian. "We have a very good cephalopod collection and the trilobites are very, very good," she adds.
The museum houses vast collections. The mammals department has 85 percent of all mammal genera, according to Maria E. Rutzmoser, acting director of the mammal collection. "You have certain masterpieces of art as part of a national treasure and this is a planetary treasure," she says.
A curator, who maintains and expands the collection in addition to full-time duties as a professor, heads each collection.
The curators do occassional research with their collections. For example, Turner says, Agassiz Professor of Geology Stephen J. Gould, curator of Invertebrate Paleontology (see accompanying story), works with his-collections and the mollusks department for his evolutionary studies.
Expanding the collections and doing research with them are, therefore, closely connected. "The two are so closely integrated in that you need to be able to go where you want for your research and you need the collection," says Turner.
As a result of her own special study, the mollusk department "has the best collection of ship worms anywhere in the world with 50 to 75 times the amount," she adds.
For the most part, collecting for the museums is selective Professors and graduate students bring back specimens from their work and the curator chooses from these samples. But the museum no longer engages in the large-scale collecting for the sake of collecting expeditions that it once did.
The mammals department has the largest collection of gibbons because of expeditions in Borneo and Thailand that "decimated whole hill sides," Rutzmoser says, adding. "We wouldn't do that anymore."
At times, the Museum's collections and expertise have been called to strange tasks. During World War II, when U.S. troops were in the Pacific, an indigenous snail became a major health problem spreading schistosomiasis. Because of the collections, the museum was able to give the Army distribution patterns for the snails and tell the soldiers where dangerous areas existed Eventually a graduate student from the museum joined the soldiers in scouting streams ahead of time, collecting the snails and warning the troops where to avoid the snail. Turner says.
Most of the museum's collecting is not done in such an odd way, though it certainly has a long history of strange collecting expeditions. Today as in the past, the museum's attempts to expand are hampered by space and money limitations.
The museum began with a small collection of Professor Louis Agassiz's in the mid 19th century. Agassiz's collection was the result of years of personal work and care but he later sold it to Harvard, forming the core of the collection. And while most of today's curators say that they don't have enough room, the early collection had neither enough space nor a permanent location.
In its first few years, it occupied the site of Hemenway Gym. The original building then became a club for the museum assistants while the collection migrated to the site of the Peabody Museum. In 1852, the University bought the collection and put it on more stable footing. Massachusetts incorporated the trustees of the museum in 1859 and gave it a relatively large trust fund to expand, but the scientific research was left to the University and Agassiz. One year later Agassiz persuaded the University to donate the land where the museum now stands.
By the end of 1860, the first part of the building was standing, and Agassiz and his 19 assistants began collecting and expanding. From then until 1901, the museum added eight new buildings all integrated into the main structure. During that time, it launched several collecting expeditions and became best known for its Brazilian fish.
A year ago, the museum was ranked the top university collection and training ground in its field by the National Academic of the Sciences not just for fish anymore.
Other museums in the nation are bigger and richer the two most notable being the Smithsonian and New York's Museum of Natural History in New York. The Smithsonian, for example, is expanding at a rate of almost one million specimens a year and receives substantial funding subsidies fron the federal government. But for a University museum. Harvard has one of the most diverse and largest collections.
The museum is limited by space, and most department curators say that while they are expanding, progress is very slow. Many of the departments are currently engaged in reorganizing their collections and bringing them out of disrepair. Funding for such activities comes primarily from the federal government and National Science Foundation grants, McCarthy says.
The museum has its own endowment which helps pay for building upkeep and overhead and also receives some aid from the faculty, which pays the professors salaries and for the library, he adds.
Not the richest museum around, the MCZ has gone through periods of tight finances. "You don't make money at this," Turner says. "People do this because they love it," she adds.
The discovery of asbestos in the museum more than a year ago made museum workers stop and think about their work, but since that finding, the museum has taken steps to protect workers from the cancer-causing material. "To the best of our knowledge, there is no asbestos hazard in the Museum," McCarthy says, adding, "I am confident that the job was done properly."
"I don't think it scared anybody," says Ronald C. Eng, a curatorial associate in Invertabrate paleontology. "When the found out about it they took steps," he remarks, saying, "People weren't frightened; they still come in every day and work in the building."