Lately, natural history museums have been under siege. They have been battling to remind society of their importance, to remain funded, and to prove the utility of old, dead things in this very technological 21st century. This war goes on even when so many biological subdisciplines are moving away from natural history and toward theories and models, when fewer people than ever are dreaming of a (dare I say it) romantic career as a taxonomist, and when funding is being increasingly directed elsewhere.

Flat-out magical. Photo of some the Smithsonian Institution’s bird collection by Chip Clark.

Arguably the biggest victim of this trend, as one might expect, is the small university museum. Universities, for much of their histories, have been central to the exploration of local flora and fauna. State land-grant universities in particular often have surprisingly large collections from a time when more resources (and public interest) were more invested in the natural historian. In times when the natural world was more ‘wild’ and was conceived as more romantic, natural history museums were the epicenter of its exploration by humans. There, exotic findings and novel discoveries were documented, and were revealed for the first time to an eager and curious public. Any university worth its reputation would have housed a natural history collection, even if small. And the big museums — like Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, or London’s Natural History Museum — were (and are) flat-out magical.

Since the scientific revolution, great discoveries hail from the halls of natural history museums. Museums are the institutional home for taxonomy, where species are made available for study and conservation by the process naming. This process can often only be done using the veritable database that every museum specimen is, and in spite of some recent calls to use photos or other digital representations instead of museum specimens, this very recent article on the “Omani Owl” demonstrates why. In addition, museums have provided an intellectual milieu for some of history’s most eminent biologists.

One beautiful result of the natural history & taxonomic work that happens in museums: scientific illustration. Photo from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, famous for the failure of his proposed evolutionary mechanisms, only supported organic evolution as a concept for having had Paris’s National Museum of Natural History at his disposal. While his theories ultimately failed, he was among the first well-known academics to support the theory of organic evolution, an act which had tangibly influenced thinkers in England, including Charles Darwin.

Walter Rothschild drove the cataloguing of life in some of the Earth’s most remote places through the task of filling a museum, one that would become the largest zoological collection ever assembled by a private individual. Now split up, much of this collection — including 280,000 bird specimens — is still driving discovery at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

This collection of 280,000 was fundamental to the success of Ernst Mayr. Mayr was ornithologist who spent much of his career as a curator and biogeographer at AMNH, describing 26 new species himself and cataloging many more in three detailed volumes (“New Species of Birds Described from 1938 to 1941,” “New species of birds described from 1941 to 1955,” & “New species of birds described from 1956 to 1965”). He would later go on to be an architect of the synthesis between genetics and evolutionary theory, along with developing the Biological Species Concept, modernizing avian systematics, popularizing evolutionary theory, and publishing 25 books and more than 300 publications. One must wonder what Mayr would have been without the American Museum of Natural History.