Harvard Mineralogical Museum

The Harvard Mineralogical Museum, on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History and traces its origins to 1784, when Benjamin Waterhouse established what became the oldest university collection in the United States. By 1805, that collection held 1,600 specimens. Its development was shaped by Harvard’s nineteenth-century expansion in natural science, including the 1859 completion of the University Museum building under Louis Agassiz and the creation of a Geological Museum in 1901 under Alexander Agassiz. In 1966, the Mineralogical and Geological museums merged. Today, the museum holds about 400,000 specimens.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States