Approximately 148 million: That’s the number of specimens – including plants, animals, minerals and human artifacts – curators estimate are held in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. However, these estimates do not reflect the billions of tiny individual specimens contained on microscope slides – thin pieces of glass that fix objects in place for observation – each representing a record of a species at a specific place and time.
Microscope slide collections are an underused part of natural history collections because they are small, fragile and generally not well cataloged. One slide is usually recorded as a single specimen, even though it may contain hundreds of thousands of identifiable samples. They play a significant role in documenting life both present and past, and they are also a core educational resource for training future scientists.
