Harvard’s Museum of Natural History is using new technology to make specimens collected over the past 150 years relevant to modern science.

Hidden away in the Harvard Museum of Natural History—past a case full of George Washington’s stuffed pheasants and a sperm whale skeleton—is a 30-year veteran of the museum who has witnessed a revolution in its work.

Professor of Biology Kenneth J. Boss, who curates Harvard’s million-strong mollusk collection, laughs when he gives directions to his office based on mounted skeletons.

“Anybody at Harvard who misses a sperm whale doesn’t belong at Harvard,” Boss says.

The office itself is full of maps to help him organize specimens and plot expeditions. Every horizontal surface is stacked high with scientific articles, papers and photographs.

Boss, who will be retiring next year after more than 30 years at Harvard, leads the way out of his office and into a tangled warren of wooden cabinets, each of which contains thousands of shells.

“I don’t know how many specimens are in that drawer, but lots,” Boss says. “No one would be foolish enough to try to count the total number of specimens here. It’s easy to get into the millions.” As he speaks, he touches a padded case holding a few tiny Atlantic abalone shells. “These are rare, very hard to get,” Boss says.

But these days, few people come to see the shells. With the rise of molecular biology, the old-fashioned comparison of dead specimens is done less and less.

This reality has forced the museum to go beyond bottling frogs and stuffing birds. Researchers at the museum now take DNA from specimens and posts catalogues of its collections to the Internet to keep itself relevant to contemporary biology.

But at the museum, things move slowly.

“This is a museum of a museum,” Boss says. “We have the same display cases as a hundred years ago, the same specimens. If you look at it, you can still see the remnants of art nouveau in the ironworks. This is not a modern museum.”

Old Species, New Challenges

While the exterior appearance of the collections may have remained relatively unchanged in the last ten years, the mission of the collections—and the science they support—has undergone radical evolution.

The Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), one of the three museums composing the Museum of Natural History, includes most of the university’s biological specimens.

The MCZ was founded in 1859—the same year that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species—by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who stridently rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution.

According to Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology James Hanken, director of the MCZ and curator of the herpetology collection, Agassiz’s views had a large impact on the original work of the museum.