10 beautiful and curious photos from the collection of a large natural history museum

Have you heard about (or had the privilege of visiting) the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, USA? Founded in 1910, it is run by the Smithsonian Institute and occupies an area equivalent to no less than 18 football fields - home to a collection of over 126 million items, including cultural artifacts and natural specimens - of which over 30 one thousand square meters are dedicated to public visitation.

The collections include 35 million insects that have been carefully pinned in boxes, 7 million fish preserved in pots, 4.5 million plants, 2 million objects from different cultures, including 400, 000 photos, as well as fossils, minerals, meteorites etc.

To cope with all this, the museum has over 1, 000 employees, of which nearly 200 are Natural History experts - making up the largest team dedicated to natural and cultural research in the world. Of course, only part of the collection is exposed to the public, and if you're curious about how the giant collection is cataloged and stored, take a look at the following images:

1 - Anthropology

Only about 3% - approximately - of all anthropological artifacts in the museum's collection are exposed to the public.

2 - Entomology

As we explained earlier, the museum has a collection of insects with 35 million copies, making it the second largest in the world. To give you an idea, the 300, 000 species that the collection houses represent about 60% of all known insect families so far on the planet.

3 - Invertebrate Zoology

The invertebrate collection also has 35 million specimens.

4 - Mineral Sciences

The mineral sciences collection consists of over 350, 000 minerals and 10, 000 gems.

5 - Botany

The plant collection that is part of the museum's herbarium has more than 1.2 million items - which began to be collected in 1838.

6 - Paleobiology

The fossils are also part of the collection - totaling over 40 million specimens that include over 1, 500 different dinosaurs and span 2.5 billion years of Earth History.

7 - Fish

The fish collection began to be formed in the mid-19th century and today has over 19, 000 copies from around the world.

8 - Mammals

The mammal collection has hundreds of whale skulls and bones that are stored in a huge shed.

9 - More mammals

But the mammal collection is not just home to big animals! In total, there are about 590 thousand copies.

10 - Birds

The museum's bird collection is the third largest in the world and has more than 640, 000 copies.

According to Chris Weller of the Business Insider portal, the images you just saw above show some of the National Museum of Natural History's major collections and the people responsible for keeping them in order and have been clicked over for 17 years by the photographer. Head of the museum, Chip Clark.

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