If you’ve ever wondered where all the items in a Smithsonian museum that aren’t actively being displayed to the public end up, look no further than this massive, secure facility, sitting just outside D.C. in Suitland, Maryland.
In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” we’re heading to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s support center, a place that houses more than 150 million specimens that predominantly belong to the museum.
In the words of Rebecca Johnson, chief scientist at the natural history museum, who showed us around campus, this guarded facility contains the contents of “everything that we know about life, Earth and the universe.”
So it’s no big deal.
On this adventure, we explored some of the support center’s “pods,” such as football field-length, three-story chambers containing millions of items each.
We found a little bit of fascination in everything from meteorite and asteroid samples (the oldest specimens at the museum support center, from more than 4.5 billion years ago when our universe first formed) to prehistoric fossils, to an entire collection of oceanic specimens — spread out over 19 miles of shelving and stored inside more than 500,000 gallons of ethanol combined.
In the coming weeks on “Matt About Town,” we’ll be doing deep dives into different wings of the support center’s campus, showing you everything from a “fish library” to a whale bone repository to an exotic greenhouse and much more.
In the meantime, enjoy this overview of a campus not many know about. It’s a place that continually reveals more mysteries of our natural world to us every day!
To learn more about the museum support center, go to its website.
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