Harvard Museum of Natural History

Dave and I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History yesterday to check out the special exhibit "Sea Creatures in Glass". The HMNH is most famous for the Glass Flowers, an incredible collection of botanical models made in glass.

The sea creatures and the flowers were all made by a father-son team, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, in Dresden, from 1887-1936. They are so detailed and accurate it's hard to believe they aren't real. They worked from specimens and drawings, and built over 3,000 models. It's well worth a visit when you're in the Cambridge area!

We also checked out the fossils, the preserved specimens, and the rocks and minerals. The museum is very old fashioned in some ways--there are halls and halls of slightly moth-eaten taxidermied animals in antique glass and wood cases--but is also really up to date--one of the other special exhibits was on climate change. A friendly staff person pointed out this neat photo op, of a right whale and a porpoise skeleton:

And finally, they have a preserved specimen of one of my favorite fish, the Coelacanth, aka the living fossil:

It's just so weird! I love it. I've been fascinated by them since I first read about them in the fourth grade.

Full set of photos on Flickr!