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Harvard Museum of Natural History | |
| The famous glass flowers are here, as are Mayan artifacts and lots more. | ||
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Located on Oxford Street, a 10-minute walk from Harvard Square (map), the huge and rambling museum building houses two museums in one: Harvard Museum of Natural History The world-famous collection of glass flowers features more than 3000 incredibly delicate and detailed glass replicas of flowers created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka between 1887 through 1936. The historic replicas were made in the days before color photography allowed a botanist to make teaching aids easily and cheaply with only a camera. The variety of flowers and other plants on view and the craftsmanship that it took to make them are truly amazing. The zoology collections are favorites with children: rooms with stuffed animals gathered around the world, from a tiny hummingbird to a towering giraffe. Sharks, ostriches, hippopotamuses and zebras abound, as do the exotic beasts from exotic places: tapirs, lemurs, quetzals, and aardvarks. The museum is a product of the 19th-century rage for natural history, which sent Harvard men all over the world in search of specimens to use in scientific teaching. Don't miss the full-size whale skeletons, in the same high-ceilinged room that houses the giraffe. The geological and mineralogical collections are an unusually comprehensive systematic mineral collection, including gems, meteorites, and minerals from New England. Newer exhibits include one on arthropods (the million-species phylum that incudes thousands of bugs, spiders and millipedes as well as crabs, lobsters and shrimp) and another on climate change. The Museum Shop is one of Cambridge's most fascinating places with wonderful collections of minerals, jewelry, books, toys, games and stuffed animals on sale. In the same building complex as the Harvard Museum of Natural History is the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, important collections gathered by adventurers, explorers, archeologists, and scholars. The museum's strong suit is the indigenous peoples of North America. The Mayan civilization is particularly well represented, with statues (authentic as well as fiberglass copies), wall-size photographs of jungle scenes, copies of the giant stelae and zoomorphs from Quirigua, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras, gold jewelry, and household artifacts. Notes and extracts from diaries posted here and there give you an idea of what it was like being one of the first archeologists to discover and study these fascinating works of art. Other exhibits cover the tribal art of Oceania, and 19th-century photographs and objects from Japan. You can visit both the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum on the same admission ticket. From Harvard Square, ask your way to the Science Center and Memorial Hall (map), then walk between these buildings to get to Oxford St. Walk north on Oxford, and the third building on your right (a large, rambling 19th-century red-brick structure) is the museum complex. Harvard Museum of Natural History Busch-Reisinger Museum (Germanic art) Arthur M Sackler Museum (Asian art) |
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Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge MA.
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