Making the Invisible Visible
Slide-mounted specimen of Hydrozoan, Obelia commissuralis. MCZ:IZ:1035PLACE0652. Museum of Comparative Zoology © President and Fellows of Harvard College
A new exhibit at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, Making the Invisible Visible, invites visitors to explore a hidden world of tiny creatures preserved on microscope slides. The slides are part of a collection in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), which holds around 50,000 such slides, revealing intricate details under magnification: dragonfly wing veins, beetle antennae symmetry, soft coral sent by Charles Darwin and a pseudoscorpion mounted in 1891 by Harvard curator Nathan Banks, which has survived more than 130 years.
Professor Mansi Srivastava joined with MCZ curatorial staff from entomology, invertebrate zoology and malacology to locate, restore, rehouse, and digitize these slides that had been largely overlooked for over a century, making them widely accessible online. At the exhibit, interactive microscopes allow visitors to zoom in, compare cleaned and preserved slides, and appreciate the hidden beauty and scientific significance of these minute treasures, connecting centuries of research to the modern world.
This exhibition was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Professors Mansi Srivastava and Naomi Pierce, and MCZ curatorial staff Adam Baldinger, Crystal Maier, and Jennifer Trimble.