The Harvard Museum of Natural History houses three collections in one building: zoology, paleontology, and mineralogy. The great Victorian display halls contain more curiosities per square metre than almost any other museum in New England — glass-topped cases of beetles, whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling, meteorites, and an enormous collection of gem-quality minerals.
The centerpiece is the Blaschka Glass Flowers, a collection of botanically exact glass plant models created by a father-and-son team of German artists in the late 19th century. They were commissioned because photographic techniques of the era could not adequately capture plant specimens; the Blaschkas produced work so accurate that the collection has never been surpassed and remains the standard against which all botanical illustration is measured. Admission covers the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology next door.