{"id":1050,"date":"2024-11-19T09:57:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T09:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/?p=1050"},"modified":"2025-02-10T20:16:49","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T20:16:49","slug":"museum-5-harvard-museum-of-natural-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/2024\/11\/19\/museum-5-harvard-museum-of-natural-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Museum 5: Harvard Museum of Natural History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Katie Koenig<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a medium-sized museum, comfortably larger than the Institute of Contemporary Art, but much smaller than the behemoth that is the Museum of Fine Art. It\u2019s just one floor, but there are many sprawling rooms with different exhibitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The museum typically hosts a few different special programs and events per month. I\u2019ve been to one, ArtsThursdays: Sea Monsters, which centered around the museum\u2019s exhibit \u201cSea Monsters: Wonders of Nature and Imagination<\/a>\u201d with several lecturers and art activities. It was free admission, but not all events are. It\u2019s a good idea to check if the event that you\u2019re interested in has an additional fee by checking out the description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All events are listed on the museum\u2019s program webpage<\/a>, but a quick highlight is Science Spotlights: Finding New Species<\/a> on November 16. Most of the events are shorter lectures or teaching workshops, and pretty regularly require a hefty admission fee. Still, the museum also hosts plenty of engaging standard exhibits to explore!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For anyone who has already been to the Museum of Natural History, it should come as no surprise that my favorite exhibit is Glass Flowers<\/a>, right behind the entrance desk. It\u2019s an internationally acclaimed collection of anatomically accurate, glass-blown flowers and plants. They\u2019re displayed in glass cases that stretch in rows across the entire room, stretching up onto the walls. The lighting\u2014spotlights designed to illuminate just the delicate glass structures\u2014leaves the room with a cozier feeling than many museum rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the warm, dark brown wood of the cases\u2019 frames and the gentle, yellow walls, the lighting gives a sense of a much smaller, shorter room, where it feels like you\u2019re surrounded by the colorful, glistening glass displayed like real herb specimens. It\u2019s hard to properly describe this display, honestly, but it feels almost like walking into a different world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These flowers aren\u2019t the museum\u2019s only display of amazing species\u2019 diversity. Several other exhibits focus on New England\u2019s local biodiversity, like the Marine Life<\/a> exhibit which has a larger than life recreation of the incredible species in New England coasts. There is also the New England Forests<\/a> exhibit that explores these ecosystems, their importance, and their changes due to human interaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another personal favorite is the museum\u2019s mineral collection<\/a>, with hundreds of stones,geodes, and minerals of a dizzying array of colors, shapes, and textures. I\u2019ve spent over an hour in this exhibit alone, meandering around the displays with a friend, ranking and rating all of the stones that caught our eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One last exhibit I\u2019ll bring your attention to is Climate Change<\/a>. It hosts a lot more reading than some other exhibits, I\u2019ll admit, but this provides an incredibly informative experience on recent ecological changes and innovations related to climate change. It goes into coral bleaching, impacts on biodiversity, and the increasing natural disasters our world is experiencing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Hurricanes Helene and Milton still so recent, this information is only becoming more relevant and important to our lives in the U.S., not to mention the drastic effects of climate change other parts of the world have already been experiencing for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main thing I want to highlight is that this museum has an amazing array of displays and collections. Whether you like monsters, animals and sea creatures, ecosystems, geology, insects, skeletons and evolution, or anything else, there\u2019s almost certainly an exhibit that will fascinate you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This museum is attached to Harvard\u2019s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, so admission to one gets you admission to the other. Peabody is accessible through the Natural History Museum to the right of the entrance, at the farthest end of that corridor of rooms. The museum website has a map<\/a> if you want to locate it in advance, which is listed at the bottom of the museum\u2019s exhibitions page. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvard actually has four different science and culture museums<\/a>, so there is plenty to check out if natural history doesn\u2019t interest you. They\u2019re all located<\/a> very close to each other, so whether you go to one or another of these museums, navigation is all the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Admission is $15 for everyone (including adults!). Students get a five dollar discount, so our tickets are only $10. If you\u2019re a Massachusetts resident, you can get free admission every Sunday morning from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and on Wednesdays from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm, although you need some proof of residency like a driver\u2019s license or some form of state ID.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From downtown Boston, you can hop on the Red Line towards Alewife and get off on the Harvard stop. Crossing Harvard Yard, you have to walk about ten minutes through it and campus buildings to reach the tall, wide brick building that hosts the museum. Keep in mind that it\u2019s located on the third floor, so when you enter you\u2019ll need to follow the signs upstairs to the entrance desk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Katie Koenig The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a medium-sized museum, comfortably larger than the Institute of Contemporary Art, but much smaller than the behemoth that is the Museum of Fine Art. It\u2019s just one floor, but there are many sprawling rooms with different exhibitions. The museum typically hosts a few different special […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3067,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[39],"class_list":["post-1050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sustainability-in-boston","tag-by-katie-koenig"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3067"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1051,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions\/1051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/sustainable-emerson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}