Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

August 14, 2023

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

With my time limited in Washington DC, I had to make some difficult choices on what to go and see. It has been many years since I really had a solid visit, so I really wanted to take in some of the amazing Smithsonian Museums at the National Mall. There are just so many to choose from and there was absolutely no way that I would be able to take them all in. 

My favorite is the Air and Space Museum, but it is also the one that I have visited the most often, so I wanted to see something different, so I began at the incredible and massive Museum of Natural History. This is the one that I recall the most from my first visit to Washington DC as a child. The impression that walking into the Rotunda and seeing the massive 11 ton, thirteen foot tall Bull elephant, Henry made on me as a child stays with me to this day and walking into that space again some fifty years later , I am still in awe.

The towering elephant symbolizes just what a Natural History Museum is and should be, and while the idea of taxidermy being somewhat dated as a way to display and educate about wild animals is somewhat dated, the museum has gone to great lengths to modernize and integrate their displays for a modern audience.

There is a reason that this museum is the single most visited museum of any kind in the United States, it has a simply spectacular collection of over 146 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals,rocks, meteorites, human remains and cultural artifacts. It is the largest natural history collection in the world.

It is absolutely impossible to see it all on a single visit, or even probably in a week of visits, so I wanted to catch a few highlights and focus on a couple of the massive galleries without even trying to cover the entirety of the exhibits. I started in the Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals where I was able to check out the world’s largest diamond, the famous Hope Diamond. I also visited the incredible Star of Asia sapphire and saw many of the over 15,000 precious gems on display.

In the Hall of Mammals, I witnessed a portion of what is the largest collection of invertebrates found anywhere in the world. Posed from the floor to the ceiling, the animals in this exhibition range from the familiar Eastern gray squirrel to the rare okapi, a central African mammal so shy scientists didn’t know it existed until the early 1900s. It is a fascinating display and a bit overwhelming.

My next stop was the Ocean Hall, a personal favorite. The Sant Ocean Hall opened on September 27, 2008, and is the largest renovation of the museum since it opened in 1910. The hall includes 674 marine specimens and models drawn from the over 80 million specimens. It is yet another massive and impressive display and something that I just love to see. 

Of course long perished animals and collections of skeletons of prehistoric dinosaurs are all well and good, but perhaps my favorite part of the museum features living creatures, the Insect zoo features live insects and exhibits about insects and entomologists. Different habitats have been created to show the type of insects that live in different environments and how they have adapted to a freshwater pond, house, mangrove swamp, desert, and rain forest. 

https://naturalhistory.si.edu/