Harvard museum showcases dodo, extinct toad and 300-million-year-old fern

Image: From Left to Right/Dodo skeleton/Tony Rinaldo/Jewel-like beetles and weevils and Komodo dragon skull/Stephanie Mitchell 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 visitThe 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...