The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History

by Nancy Pick, Mark Sloan

Where do you find Nabokov's butterflies, George Washington's pheasants, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition? The vast collections of animals, minerals, and plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History are among the oldest in the country, dating back to the 1700s. In the words of Edward O. Wilson, the museum stands as both "cabinet of wonder and temple of science." Its rich and unlikely history involves literary figures, creationists, millionaires, and visionary scientists from Asa Gray to Stephen Jay Gould. Its mastodon skeleton -- still on display -- is even linked to one of the nineteenth century's most bizarre and notorious murders.

"The Rarest of the Rare" tells the fascinating stories behind the extinct butterflies, rare birds, lost plants, dazzling meteorites, and other scientific and historic specimens that fill the museum's halls. You'll learn about the painting that catches Audubon in a shameful lie, the sand dollar collected by Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, and dozens of other treasures in this surprising, informative, and often amusing tour of the natural world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Museums, Natural History, Nature, Photography

192 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Judy]

A good many years ago, I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History -- not just once, but several times. I have vivid memories of the glass flower collection and of a group of large mammals standing stiffly next to one another facing viewers. I figured that the mammalian line-up was probably the way all museums had been organized before curators started staging natural settings for the animals.

While this is a history of the museum, it is also a history (albeit it brief and incomplete) of scientists who focused on the natural world. Each page offers a vignette about a scientist and about his/her object of study.

A few interesting facts:

pp 8 & 9
Harvard was founded back in 1636 by members of the Mass. Bay Colony, just 16 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Aiming to turn out well-educated ministers, Harvard taught astronomy almost from the start ... Graduating ministers, it was thought, needed to be able to interpret comets and other heavenly phenomena for their communities.

p 130
Ants, although nearly deaf to airborne sounds, are quite sensitive to vibrations.
That makes sense, but I'd never wondered about ants' senses. Do they hear? What about taste?

p 18 references Samuel Scudder's essay about observing a fish under Louis Agassiz's insistence. This is my all time favorite essay, and I value the lesson it teaches about being a careful observer.

[Jim]

This book is for all those people who have stood in front of a display case in some museum and thought to themselves, "I wish I could see what they have behind those closed doors."
I once wrote a letter to a curator of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and asked him if I could come and see some of the collections that were not on display (I was 10 years old). He never wrote back. This book takes away some of the anguish I feel when I know there is so much cool stuff behind the closed doors of our nations natural history collections. There are so many awesome things in this book you can re-read it over and over. From Geore Washington's stuffed Golden Phaesants that were a gift from Lafayette to a Blanding's Turtle shell collected by Thoreau at Walden Pond. This is a neat book that gives a rare glimpse into a major institutions natural history collection. Be prepared for the hours to slip away while reading this book.

[Stephen]

I perhaps will never get to visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History. If so, this book is the next best thing. Its pages showcase some of the museum’s best and rarest specimens and the stories behind them; treasures like the Lewis’s woodpecker collected by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806, a sprig of cranberry from New England pressed by Henry David Thoreau, a lemon-breasted berrypecker and a orange-crowned fairy wren collected by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in the mountains of New Guinea and a pickled turtle embryo collected by celebrated zoologist Louis Agassiz. (That's a long sentence. I'm exhausted with it. Are you?)

Also you’ll find botanist Asa Gray’s "Shortia," a long-lost flowering plant that grows only in the mountains of Western North Carolina and a beautiful birdwing butterfly from Papua New Guinea discovered by Carl von Hagen around 1900. The photograph of the specimen is remarkable, considering that even though the pinned lepidopteran made it out to civilization, its collector did not. Von Hagen was killed and eaten by cannibals living on the island. Oh, the price of science. Who would guess that butterfly collecting could be so dangerous?

Beautiful photographs. Strange tales indeed.

[Anna]

This is an incredibly cool book which reminds you of the mysteries and beauties of science. It looks something like a catalogue book of a museum show. But it has a short history of the Harvard Museum of Natural History as well as multiple pictures and histories of various artifacts etc in the museum. The pictures are awesome and some of the back-stories are quite unusual (my favourite is the professor who lends money to another professor to buy a mastadon skelton; the creditor is murdered by the debtor presumably when he asked for his money back and the murderer is eventually hanged). My favourite picture is the butterfly that is male on one wing and female on the other. How on earth does that happen?

[Chloe]

This was absolutely delightful - full of beautiful photographs, interesting anecdotes, and tons of fun facts. It makes me miss the Harvard Museum of Natural History something fierce, though... I so look forward to the day when I'll be able to walk through its halls and say hello to my favorite specimens once again.

[LINDA]

A treasure, page after page of interesting stories. Any book with a butterfly genitalia cabinet, a story of how a watermark was used to derail the lie of a famed avian illustrator’s falsely dated ruffed grouse image, and a dragonfly wing fossil from the Permian period when the wingspan of this dragonfly was nearly 2.5 feet is bound to be among my favorites!

[Colleen]

Nice selection of items from the museum with interesting stories attached and beautiful pictures to illustrate.

[Pam]

Despite its minature size of 8" x 9", The Rarest of the Rare; Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History is really among the best coffee table books as it is illustrated with gorgeous photographs. The beginning of the book gives an overview of the collection including how it grew and the important men involved. But the best part are the one page essays on specific items in their collection which cover a wide range from bones of extinct creatures to minerals and early illustrations. For anyone who is interested in natural history, this is a great read!

[Julie]

Beautiful! Fascinating! You can almost smell the dust and history on these specimens. Vladimir Nabokov's collection of butterfly genitalia... on the other hand, doesn't photograph well.
But! I got to write the phrase "Vladimir Nabokov's collection of butterfly genitalia" ! :)

[Gemma]

This book is fantastic. I have really enjoyed learning about early museums, early collecting, lives of scientists, and boson history from this book. I now want more museums to describe their early formation, but maybe they won't have as colorful and interest history. I really enjoyed visiting Harvards natural hisotry museum (and comparative zoology and mineral museums). I purchased this book used after my visit because I wanted to learn more. I went to see the glass flowers (and glass sea creatures), but I was impressed at the whole collect! Mostly the text next to all the animals and minerals and fossils were so well written giving a what is it, when is it, and interesting context that i wanted to learn more. (I can only hope they are not AI). For thoses going to the museum the taxidermy animals - showing stuffones next to their skeletons is extensive im sad i missed finding the extinct dodoamd great auk birds. There is a huge collection of taxidermy fish. Amazing fossils - some focusing on the transition of birds to repitiles, and then i ended on the incredible mineral room. Large minerals and grouped by faimlies of elements i didnt fully understand, despite enjoying chemistry.


The first chapter is fantastic history. The later chapters each page group an item from the museum to its story of origin grouped into thematic chapters. Perhaps one of my take aways is how many writers were actually naturalists (henry david thoreau of walden pond fame donated his pressed flowers and turtle shell collections
vladimir nabokov of lolita fame was researcher and his study and collection of butterflies is storied there. Charles dickens pet raven inspired edgar allen poe writing about ravens. And more writers feature)


I admit I haven't finished this book yet, as nonfiction books can be slower to read, but i am slowly getting through it. I hope to return to the museum after finishing the book, but i know that may take a few years.

Ive been reading this book concurrently with the book called Chasing Beauty about Isabella steward gardner and her formation of the art museum/palace nearing her name that she founded in Boston about the same time as the harvard museum was getting started (or a bit later). There is a lot of interesting overlap in people of the time and a better understanding of boston at the time. (I enjoyed Boston and lived there a few years and i would now recommend both harvard natural history museum and isabella steward gardner museum as my favorites.)

I also read 10 birds that changed the world by stephen moss at about the same time, and some of his stories on birds and collecting relate to aspects of this museums history really well.

[dejah_thoris]

Lovely pictures with descriptions and stories in a small oversize book. Motivated me to buy a copy of The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants and borrow a copy of Murder at Harvard. I'm now keen to visit this museum if I'm ever in Cambridge to see the glass flowers and Nabokov's butterfly genitalia collection. Very light reading and quite amusing too.

[Mike]

Images were striking but poorly identified and described. Introduction for each section was largely a verbatim cut-and-paste of image descriptions. Image descriptions were poorly written and uninteresting.

I expected much more from this visual catalog of items.

[Sandy]

An interesting visit behind the scenes of my local museum with some fascinating stories. I have attended member tours of a few back rooms and there is a tremendous wealth of material.

[Lance Grabmiller]

Much of this is gorgeous, but it has some unnecessary repetition in the text and a few of the photographs are surprisingly bad (the glare on the Dimetrodon fossil, for instance).

[Melinda]

Beautiful pictures and some interesting stories about the natural history treasures at Harvard.

[Cassie]

If you were one of those kids who ALWAYS got the latest edition of "Ripley's Believe it or Not" for Christmas each year, this book is for you.

[Kathy]

I would've liked to see more of the glass flowers - what they showed was amazing. The butterflies were beautiful.

[Ann]

This book falls somewhere between a coffee-table book and a collection of mini-essays. The introduction by E.O. WIlson describes how collections of stuffed, dissected or otherwise preserved animals were once a great teaching tool, then become unfashionable during the genetics/molecular biology era, and are now enjoying a modest renaissance. The author then takes us briefly through the history of the collections at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (including murder and mayhem!) before inviting us on a tour of selected artifacts and the anecedotes associated with them. There are no serious (or tedious, depending on your point of view) discussions of the finer points of zoology here. Every page has a gorgeous photograph of some treasure in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and some accompanying text. THe offerings range from the skeleton of a dodo, to tapeworms obtained from the gut of prominent Bostonians in the 19th century, to a bird stuffed by Lewis of LEwis & Clarke. There are iridescent beetles, an extinct parakeet, meteorites.... Although most of the artifacts shown in the book date from the 18th or 19th century, complete with yellowed handwritten label, one of the most heartening messages in the book was that new species are still being uncovered, that new discoveries are still being made, and that these "old-fashioned" natural history museums and their collections still have something useful to offer to students of nature.

I read this book in an evening, taking the time to enjoy the outstanding pictures. There is no continuous narrative but every page can be read as its own mini-essay, creating a reading experience akin to picking chocolates from a delicious assortment. Definitely worth reading if you have even a casual interest in nature, or if you're planning a visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History

[Benjamin Chandler]

This is a fun little book that highlights portions of the collection at Harvard's natural history museum. The text is fun, consisting of short essays about the odd characters that have collected the specimens and curious facts regarding the specimens themselves. But the real joy of the book is the photography. It reminds me a lot of Rosamund Purcell's work, with lacquered animals, fountain pen notes, various fossils, and colorful, but slightly sad-looking, stuffed birds.

Thank you, Karen!

[Danielle T]

I thought I read this in high school... but can't find it in IFPL's catalog unless it was purged. I *definitely* remember reading some book about the Comparative Zoology museum at Harvard... actually, I'm fairly convinced it was this one after looking for descriptions about a general audience book about this. Hm. Will have to trace down a copy and reread.

[Maris]

Beautiful pictures & nifty stories about odds and ends in the Harvard Natural History Museum. An excellent coffee table sort o' book.

[Garen]

Gorgeous. a History of the collections at Harvard's Museum of Natural History. Full of anecdotes, photos, history.

[Mary Alice]

Never finished this book. The photos are more interesting that the text which isn't saying too much. The number of typos in the text made this really too irritating to continue on with.

[Julia]

Some of the items were interesting but too many were boring. Just flip through it at the library...

[Jenett]

A really interesting overview of the Harvard Museum of Natural History - with 1-2 page profiles on specific items in the collection, where they came from, and the stories behind them.

[Alethea]

Cute, quick read. A few neat things, a few nifty pictures, but nothing like as neat as looking at objects in the flesh.

[Stephen]

Amazing cross between a resource, guidebook and a pleasure read.

[Jessica]

Fun. Goes through some of the older and more obscure residents of Harvard's Natural History museum. Truly excellent pictures and interesting stories.

[Aharon]

Beetlemania!

[Emily]

2015 Challenge - nonfiction book