Inside the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, it’s quiet in a way that feels almost deliberate. In long corridors lined with cream-colored cabinets and towering shelves, you get the sense that time is being carefully managed—like the building is less a storage space and more a living archive. Most people will never walk in here, but Science News was able to get a behind-the-scenes peek.
The scale is hard to wrap your head around. The National Museum of Natural History’s collection comprises nearly 150 million objects, spanning biological, geological, astronomical, and cultural materials. A visitor might expect bones and rocks—there are plenty of those—but the variety is the real shock: the world’s biggest mosquito collection sits alongside resplendent feathered ornaments from what is now Papua New Guinea. In storage, specimens that sound whimsical on paper turn out to be extremely real up close: stuffed pink fairy armadillos, narwhals’ spiraling tusks, and even twist tobacco used in trade during a trip to the Solomon Islands and Fiji in the early 1900s. And yes, your nose will have an opinion. One freeze-dried crabeater seal exuding an aroma of burnt soy sauce is the kind of detail you don’t forget.
The MSC opened in 1983 to ease overcrowding at the natural history museum’s main building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The center’s five storage pods are each about the size of a football field and nearly three stories tall, with a sixth pod in the works. The mission is straightforward: protect the specimens. Climate control and pest prevention matter, but the list of risks is unglamorous and nonstop—power outages, floods, flames, evaporation and explosions. Capacious freezers keep tissue and DNA samples ultracold, while dried specimens can be harmed by fire and water. Wet items in alcohol-filled jars are at risk of drying out—or blowing up. It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes fragility that makes “museum” feel like the wrong word, honestly.
Still, the MSC isn’t just locked-away inventory. Scientists visit the facility to do research and answer big questions about Earth and its inhabitants. The Smithsonian has positioned collections as something like infrastructure for knowledge—available for study today and in the future. Misryoum newsroom reported that researchers are analyzing DNA from an African elephant thought to hail from a population that has long evaded humans. Other work has used decades-old bird eggs to reveal how the insecticide DDT built up in shells and thinned them, nearly driving some species—including the bald eagle—to extinction. Johnson puts it bluntly: “There’s a cloud of knowledge about the planet that exists only because we have collections in museums.” And in a sense, that’s what the MSC really is: a way to keep evidence from vanishing.
There’s also a more human energy here. As staff members move through the space, they don’t just point—they sprint, literally, toward “just one more thing.” Misryoum editorial desk noted that this might be a coil of feathered money traditionally used for dowries in the Santa Cruz Islands in the South Pacific, or another object that seems small until you see how many stories it carries. Rebecca Johnson, the museum’s chief scientist, describes the whole network of items—whether in storage or on display—as “the record of the world.” And in an age of AI, when it’s hard to tell truth from fiction, Misryoum analysis indicates the MSC’s treasures offer something tactile: the real thing, smellable and touchable and studyable.
From there, the tour turns into a kind of curated chaos, but with a point: the objects aren’t just impressive, they’re useful. Take the hide beetle (Dermestes maculatus). Flesh-eating beetles sound scary, but they feast on the dead rather than the living—helping clean animals’ bones for the museum’s collection. Inger Toraason, an osteological specimen preparator, explained that in 2025 the beetles cleaned 429 skeletons, and they can strip a hummingbird’s bones in less than a day, while a whale skull might take months. Beetle-cleaned bones then move through more steps: Toraason picks off remaining flesh by hand and soaks bones in a degreasing solution.
Even the plants are science with personality. A tongue orchid (Bulbophyllum fletcherianum), part of the Smithsonian Gardens Orchid Collection, can stretch leaves nearly 2 meters long and emits the foul fragrance of fetid flesh. When in bloom, its smell lures pollinator insects such as blow flies or carrion beetles looking to lay eggs in dead and decaying animals. Meanwhile, a Dracula orchid (Dracula chimaera ‘Pacifica’)—found in Ecuador and Colombia—can be mistaken for a mushroom by fungus gnats, with blooms that look mushroomy and smell mushroom-like, right down to fine ribs that mimic gills.
And then there’s the wet collection: about 25 million specimens preserved in fluids at the MSC. Items including sand dollars, shrimp, coral, slipper lobsters and octopuses take up roughly 72 kilometers of shelving—more than four times as long as trails to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Most jars are filled with ethanol, nearly 2 million liters in total, and every one needs topping off as ethanol evaporates so the specimens don’t dry out. The MSC’s power needs, evaporative risks, and careful handling make it feel less like a museum basement and more like an operating system for biodiversity history—one that we’re only starting to understand. Or maybe we’ve already understood it and just… didn’t look closely enough.
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