Have you ever wondered what it looks like in the storage areas of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History? In the public areas of the museum, you can view amazing historical artifacts like moon rocks, a T-Rex skeleton, three-thousand-year-old mummies, the Hope Diamond and more.
You wouldn’t realize it but there are over 125 million cultural relics and scientific specimens housed at the museum. However, the public only gets to see a small percentage of them. The majority of the artifacts are kept in private storage where only certain employees of the museum get to go.
Photo credit: Chip Clark
It’s too bad people don’t get to see the private storage area of the museum because it is enormous and contains a wide variety of specimens and artifacts.
Photo credit: Chip Clark
Scientists at the museum have organized, preserved, and cataloged all of them for their own purposes. Their goal is to examine these discoveries from the past in order to help predict the future.
Photo credit: Chip Clark
Museum scientists work with other scientists from around the world to help figure out the mysteries of the world. For example, they’ll study the specimens of birds, bones, and butterflies to help understand the evolutionary relationships between different kinds of organisms as well as the effects of global climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
Photo credit: Chip Clark
> Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History: Website | Facebook via NMNH
