Museum of Comparative Zoology
About Museum of Comparative Zoology
The Museum of Comparative Zoology (formally the Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology and often abbreviated to MCZ) is a zoology museum located on the grounds of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is one of three natural-history research museums at Harvard, whose public face is the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Harvard MCZ's collections consist of some 21 million specimens, of which several thousand are on rotating public display. While the research collections of the MCZ are not open to the public, the museum maintains MCZbase, a public database of its zoological collections.
Many of the exhibits in the public museum have not only zoological interest, but also historical significance. Past exhibits have featured a fossil sand dollar collected by Charles Darwin in 1834, a mamo collected by Captain James Cook, and two golden pheasants that once belonged to George Washington.
Gonzalo Giribet, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, has served as the museum's director since 2021.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Founded
- 1859
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Nearby museums
Make a day of it. 4 more museums are within a mile of Museum of Comparative Zoology; the closest, Harvard Museum of Natural History, is practically next door.
