Museum of Comparative Zoology
A Harvard Museum with a Unique Collection and History
Millions of specimens provide a fascinating insight into both animals and the mind of a 19th century scientist embroiled in the debate over evolution.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss-born naturalist, paleontologist and geologist who became a leading scientist and teacher in the United States. While working in his native Switzerland he became an expert on glaciers and was one of the first scientists to propose the idea of an ice age that caused mass extinctions. He also did extensive work in the field of taxonomy, the scientific classification of organisms, and was a renowned expert on living and fossil fish.
The Museum's Founding
After emigrating to the U.S. in 1846 and joining the Harvard faculty he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass. in 1859. Agassiz designed his museum to show the comparative anatomy of different organisms, and to provide proof to support his vehement opposition to the evolution theories of Charles Darwin. His goal was to show that the order found in the variety of life was evidence of divine creation, not of biological evolution. His belief in the fixed nature of species was so strong that his work has even been used to support racist theories of white supremacy, a legacy that continues to detract from his other contributions to science.
An Enormous Collection
The Museum of Comparative Zoology's collections are largely used by students and researchers, but a number of the specimens are on display in the public galleries of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. While not as large or up-to-date as other natural history museums such as New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the Harvard collection is notable for its extreme breadth of animal specimens -- millions spread across twelve departments. Visitors can marvel at displays including hundreds of stuffed hummingbirds, each of a different species, all mounted together; animals ranging in size from the smallest mouse to elephants, hippos, polar bears and giraffes; plus various fossils and specimens with great historical significance, such as the Harvard Mastodon and a skeleton of an extinct dodo bird, as well as fossils collected by Darwin himself. In addition, visitors can enjoy an array of other exhibits at the Museum of Natural History and the adjacent Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
A Changing Mission
Agassiz served as director of the museum from its founding to his death in 1873. However, his original plan -- that the museum be proof of intelligent design -- was not to be. For many scientists the evidence in the animal collections supported Darwin, and the museum’s mission changed after Agassiz’s death. Even Agassiz's own son, Alexander, an accomplished scientist in his own right, supported the theory of evolution, though he had his own personal disputes with Darwin over specific scientific issues. To this day, budding scientists walk the halls of the museum looking for similarities in form and function that illustrate the mechanisms of evolution, rarely knowing the true purpose that drove the man who brought together so many of these specimens.
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