Harvard's Indispensable Specimens
Mark Sloan/From 'The Rarest of the Rare' by Nancy Pick; Copyright Museum of Comparative Zoology and the President and Fellows of Harvard College
From the Harvard collection: At left, a model of extinct dodo; at right, a composite dodo skeleton.
With collections dating to the late 1700s, Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology is one of the country's oldest museums. Displays drawn from the collection range from the skeleton of an extinct dodo bird to more than 300 different hummingbirds.
But the back rooms are filled with millions of items that will never be displayed. In this installment of the Hidden Treasures Radio Project, Harriet Baskas explains why curators at Harvard just can't throw anything away.
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