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Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Featured Collections

Our educators have curated these collections to let students see how comparing collection specimens can lead to new discoveries. 

Researchers who work at the museum and around the world use the museum's huge collection, which has almost 150 million items, to understand something new about how the Earth formed and how organisms live, interact in their environment, and evolve. They also study how people evolved and the diversity of ways that they have interacted — and continue to interact — with each other and their environment over time. 

Choose a collection topic below to explore and compare some of our collection objects. 

A blue and orange mandarinfish, or Synchiropus splendidus

What Makes Things Blue?

Find out what factors give some animals and minerals a blue color. Compare collection objects, such as a blue fish and a blue butterfly.

Plastic cast of a male modern human right femur. The cast displays the pathology of an unset healed fracture. Catalog number EO401737.

Forensic Mysteries

Use this collection of thigh bones to see how bones can tell the stories of people's lives. Compare a normal bone to the others, note the differences, and learn what disease or trauma caused the changes in each bone.

Fragment of fossilized Katsura tree leaf impressions left in rock. USNM Number: NC52119.

Fossil Leaves

Fossil leaves with insect damage show us ancient interactions between plants and insects. Compare four fossils and see how many types of insect damage you can find!