- 6/13/2025
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History safeguards 148 million objects, yet 99% of them remain hidden from public view in secure areas known as collections. Behind the scenes, these treasures solve real-world problems, like helping planes avoid birds and identifying invasive species threatening agriculture. Now, the museum is taking on one of its most ambitious projects ever: digitizing the entire collection and assembling a DNA library of every known complex life form. We went behind the scenes to see how breakthroughs in AI, high-resolution imaging, and robotics are making it possible.
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00:01The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History holds over 148 million specimens.
00:09And nearly all of them are hidden away in secure collections.
00:13Something that people really like to see are shark jaws and all the shark teeth.
00:17We should be able to open any of these drawers and blow your mind.
00:20Nearly everything in this archive is available for scientific research to solve real-world problems,
00:27like helping planes avoid birds and protecting the country from invasive murder hornets.
00:34Their head is very robust, bright orange. That's pretty distinctive.
00:39Now, the Smithsonian is racing to build a digital Noah's Ark.
00:43I do think that a lot of the species that we have represented here are going to be extinct,
00:47and collections like this are going to be the only place where you can find any evidence of their existence.
00:54It's a DNA library of all complex life on Earth.
00:58Supercharged with high-resolution cameras, AI, and robots.
01:03And so what used to take us a month, we can now do in less than a day.
01:07This data could unlock new medicines, fuels, and ways to grow food.
01:12So how is the Smithsonian future-proofing its collections?
01:16And what mysteries hide behind locked drawers?
01:19We can't talk about this.
01:21Oh, I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you, so...
01:26You can walk through all of the exhibits in the National Museum of Natural History in about two hours.
01:32But it would take days to tour the hidden collections that make up the rest of the space.
01:37More than 1.4 million square feet spread across the museum and the off-site support center.
01:43All the facilities combined are about the same size as the U.S. Capitol building.
01:48Museum collections are incredibly important for understanding what was there, what has changed, and what might be valuable to restore.
01:59The number of objects in the museum has grown exponentially since it was established in Washington, D.C. in 1910.
02:07New specimens arrive here in three ways.
02:10First, through donations.
02:12Like this 8,000-pound crystal from Arkansas.
02:17Second, expeditions.
02:19That's when scientists go into the field and bring samples back to Washington, D.C.
02:24You may recognize the name of the explorer who bagged this one.
02:28This label of the harpy eagle was collected in 1902.
02:31And if you turn it over, it says,
02:34Presented to biological survey by President Roosevelt.
02:38Can you see that?
02:39That'd be Teddy.
02:41Third, the museum can purchase specimens.
02:44However, this is rare.
02:46That's because the museum doesn't have a budget for it.
02:49The funds have to come from a private backer.
02:51In recent years, that's made it hard to compete with wealthy collectors for things like fossils.
02:56After the great success of the Jurassic Park movies,
03:00every billionaire and tech bro in the country wanted to have their own private dinosaur.
03:07The process to preserve and store a new specimen varies depending on what it is.
03:12Some animals get put on ice.
03:14Others stay fresh in alcohol.
03:17The museum's wet collection is filled with tiny jars and enormous vats,
03:22holding creatures like this stonefish.
03:25Most venomous in the world.
03:27Whoops.
03:28Fossils have to be painstakingly removed from layers of ancient rock, called matrix.
03:34This is a carbide needle that a very dear friend of mine carved.
03:37So this is sort of like a special needle that nobody else is allowed to touch.
03:42Specialists remove the muscles, oil glands, and other soft tissues from the birds.
03:48We want to remove as much of the muscle that we can.
03:51We're trying to make a specimen that lasts forever and strong.
03:54So I'm not a tailor or a seamstress, but I can sew up a bird pretty good.
03:59At the museum's support center just outside Washington, D.C., any recently living creatures
04:05are cleaned with the help of a non-human workforce, carnivorous beetles.
04:10They can get in very small nooks and crannies that we otherwise can't reach easily.
04:16They're kind of our unsung heroes.
04:18You can't have rotting flesh in storage.
04:20Good job.
04:21Good job.
04:22Good job.
04:23Thanks, guys, for all of your good work.
04:25Clean specimens are tagged and filed away in uniform lockers.
04:29And over the past decade, the museum has also turned millions of items into digital files.
04:36We're about to 3D scan this cactus.
04:42I absolutely do hear this in my sleep on a regular basis.
04:46If it weren't for the flash, I would be falling asleep at my desk right here,
04:49but thankfully it's there to keep me awake.
04:52There are no giant bones, but we have actually 3D scanned other bones as well.
04:57We did a skull of the dire wolf.
05:00Sylvia Orly helps lead the digitization effort.
05:03I think, wow, how great is it that I get to handle these specimens every day?
05:10I just feel very blessed to have this job.
05:13In 2022, Sylvia's team completed a 7-year effort to digitize the entire U.S. Herbarium,
05:20a collection of over 5 million plants and flowers.
05:24Now they're scaling up to digitize the entire entomology collection, which is 7 times larger.
05:31A new scanner, like the setup in this video, will take up this entire room and photograph 200,000 pollinating species a year.
05:39That's going to simplify the process greatly, where we're going to be able to digitize between 1,000 to 2,000 specimens per day using this conveyor belt.
05:47Sylvia says this project will take about a decade.
05:51But it might be faster with AI tools, which the team is already using to reposition cameras and transcribe labels.
05:58I expect in the next few years there is going to be an explosion of use, so that we may be using AI for 50% of our work.
06:06But it is just in its infancy right now, so we're excited to see what's going to happen.
06:12But not everything arrives at the Smithsonian intact.
06:15And for at least one department, that's entirely the point.
06:19In 2023, the U.S. had over 19,000 wildlife strikes on aircraft.
06:25Almost all of those were birds.
06:28Globally, they cost the airlines billions of dollars.
06:31The Smithsonian's Feather Identification Lab is here to do something about that.
06:37It's run by Carla Dove.
06:40Yeah, that's her real name.
06:42I get that all the time.
06:44My name is very appropriate.
06:46Every year, her department receives up to 12,000 samples of bird remains scraped off aircraft.
06:53It's lovingly called snarge.
06:56That comes from U.S. military slang, combining the words snot and garbage.
07:02It's up to Carla's team to use the snarge to ID the birds, so airports can use the most effective techniques to avoid them.
07:10I asked my four-year-old, what do I do at work?
07:13And she says, you look at dead animals.
07:15That's true.
07:17That's what I do at work.
07:19Sarah Luttrell is a research scientist in the bird department.
07:23So the start to our day every day is to open these up.
07:26We get a little bit of bird.
07:29We never know how much.
07:31And then we get the data.
07:33Over 70% of bird strikes occur below 500 feet, mostly during landing.
07:40Most of these collisions are non-fatal for humans.
07:43But if a bird gets sucked into a jet engine, the results could be catastrophic.
07:49Remember the plane that crash landed in the Hudson River?
07:52Less than a minute into the flight, the pilot reported a double bird strike.
07:56In that case, we got 69 bags.
07:59Because as they went through and did the investigation, they went all the way into the engine and they wanted to know how far into the engine the feathers went.
08:07Identifying the species of bird helps airports develop wildlife control programs and sensors to avoid collisions.
08:14If they can't physically ID a sample right away, the lab can compare its feathers to one of the 500,000 specimens in the museum's collection.
08:25You still need the physical sample and you still need the physical expertise to do these complex identifications.
08:32The team can get a pretty solid ID this way, but they often need extra help.
08:37We can't be 100% sure that this feather came from a Eurasian collared dove and not a pigeon, so we're going to have to send this to the DNA lab.
08:48The Smithsonian's Laboratories of Analytical Biology, or LAB for short, is the nerve center for all things DNA.
08:56Our big goal here is to document life on the planet.
09:00And in order to do that, the tool that we're using for biology is now genetics.
09:06Lee White is in charge of this multi-million dollar genome sequencing operation.
09:11A genome is the complete set of genetic material in an organism.
09:15Think of it like a blueprint for building and running a living thing.
09:19In 2009, Lee's lab helped Carla Dove's team map the genome of every known species of North American bird.
09:27That reference database has helped the feather ID lab work more efficiently.
09:32It turns out you only need a few birds to decode the instruction manual of an entire species.
09:38Relative to other organisms, birds have a smaller genome.
09:42We only need to do about five blue jays from across their range to capture all of the genetic diversity that's in blue jays.
09:50So we might have a thousand, but we only need to do five.
09:53Now Lee's team is working their way through the entire Smithsonian collection.
09:57Every plate you see holds a hundred DNA samples from many different projects and many different groups of organisms.
10:06And thanks to new lab equipment, chipping away at this massive task has never been faster.
10:11This robot automatically prepares samples for DNA sequencing, a process that used to be done manually.
10:18So this robot's really nice. I can run up to 96 samples at a time.
10:22Today we're just doing eight because that's all I had to work with.
10:25Katie Murphy is a genomic specialist who runs all of the instruments in the lab.
10:29So it'll take about an hour to get through that step.
10:32But that's an hour of the robot working that I don't need to be here for normally, although it's really fun to watch it.
10:38And one of the big projects going on is doing that for all U.S. fishes.
10:43And so right now I'm prepping samples for eight fishes.
10:47What used to take us a month, we can now do in less than a day.
10:51But what we end up with is magnitudes more data.
10:54All that data is helping to build a digital NOAA's Arc.
10:58It's called the Earth Biogenome Project, a global effort to finish mapping the genome of every species on Earth within the next decade.
11:07Once complete, it'll not only help scientists better understand life on a changing planet, but it could also unlock huge benefits for human civilization.
11:17This biological big swing stands on the shoulders of the Human Genome Project.
11:23A little over 20 years ago, scientists successfully mapped all 3.2 billion pairs of human DNA.
11:30In doing so, they sparked a biotech revolution.
11:35It gave scientists the tools to map, analyze, and compare genetic information at scale, transforming things like forensics, drug development, and ancestry testing.
11:46Biologists expect the Earth Biogenome Project to have similar results.
11:51But scientists estimate that 80-90% of Earth's species have yet to be discovered.
11:57And DNA mapping has revealed that some of the museum's own specimens, once thought to be related, are actually genetically distinct.
12:05As we go into our collections and sequence them, we find undescribed species hidden in our collections.
12:12So the goalposts keep moving, and so we have a long way to go.
12:17Take these little guys.
12:18As of right now, these two fish are considered to be the same species.
12:22And they look pretty similar, right?
12:24The one in my upper hand is from the Northern Caribbean.
12:27The one in my lower hand is from the Southern Caribbean.
12:29And because we've sequenced both of them, as a matter of fact, if I flip them over, you can see the tissue sample that we've taken from both of them.
12:36And then we ended up sequencing them.
12:38They've turned out to be wildly different.
12:40And I can't tell you right now exactly why they're different anatomically,
12:45but that is exactly what I'm going to do tomorrow, is CT scan these two specimens so that I can learn a bit about their anatomy
12:53and be able to tell you why they're two different species.
12:57So even if LAB makes it through the Smithsonian's entire collection, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
13:03Scientifically, we might have done the DNA on hundreds of thousands of species, but there's millions out there.
13:09But that's the ultimate goal is to do it all.
13:13It turns out that analyzing samples they do have helps Smithsonian researchers figure out where to look next.
13:19And to do that, you don't need a critter or even a piece of one.
13:24All you need is a sample of dirt or water and a kitchen blender.
13:30Chris Meyer has studied sea life in some of the world's most remote islands.
13:34Now, I don't spend a lot of time behind this desk.
13:37He worked with Lee to develop one of Ocean researchers' most important tools,
13:42the Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structure, or ARMS.
13:46I am a global arms dealer.
13:48Yes, we sell arms all over the world to our partners.
13:51That system was developed to mimic the nooks and crannies you find in coral reefs.
13:57Essentially, it's just a stack of plates.
14:00But tweaking its design brought out Lee's inner MacGyver.
14:04Home Depot, hardware store, online, science supply.
14:08It's really skunkworks fabrication stuff to help our scientists in the field process the biodiversity.
14:16So some of that is inventing things because they don't exist.
14:19We're doing things nobody else is doing.
14:21Researchers strategically drop arms to the seafloor.
14:25Over time, plants and animals move in.
14:29After the crates are pulled back up, scientists meticulously remove, catalog, and photograph everything larger than two millimeters.
14:38Then, they analyze the plates.
14:41All that sea life leaves behind a dazzling array of colorful patterns.
14:45When you go back and get it after a year, each plate might look something like that.
14:49So they go from being absolutely nothing to fully populated.
14:53We carefully take each plate apart, photograph each plate in a photo mosaic with a 3x5 grid,
14:59and we stitch those together to get massively high resolution pictures because I think those will leave a lasting legacy.
15:05It's remarkably high resolution, and that helps for the next step, which allows us to use machine learning to train, to classify each of these organisms into their functional categories.
15:19By now, some of the algorithms can tell which species lived in the arms just by the patterns they've left behind.
15:26Once all that's done, we scrape all the plates with paint scrapers, and we put it in a blender and grind it all up, homogenize it, make a slurry, a reef's milkshake, and it works amazingly well.
15:39I'm pretty much a blender connoisseur, so...
15:42I think this will be the tastiest reef yet.
15:45Look at that, it's frothing.
15:47I go to the different stores where you can buy blenders in the world, and the blender is the key tool.
15:54Living things can leave behind slime, feces, or even tiny cells wherever they go.
16:00The genetic fragments trapped inside this slushy mix are enough to create a clear snapshot of the ecosystem.
16:06It's called environmental DNA, or eDNA, and it's incredibly valuable.
16:12So we get a better sense of which are the winners and losers in these different systems, and what are the best sentinels of those change.
16:20eDNA can also help prevent huge economic losses.
16:24The other big utility of the arms right now is as early detectors for invasive species.
16:30Invasive species cost industries and fouling communities literally billions of dollars.
16:35When we visited Andrea Quattrini, a research scientist, she had just used eDNA to discover a new species of soft coral that was less than a centimeter tall.
16:46We basically just looked at the DNA in the water, and that was a sign that we have a new species that wasn't known to be there before.
16:55That's always super exciting for biologists like Andrea.
16:59So if we do collect a new species, I do get to describe it.
17:03You really can't describe it after yourself, but you could find probably a colleague and say,
17:08Hey, I think I collected something new, why don't you describe it, and you can name it after me.
17:14We don't do that, that's like a, what's the word?
17:18Not a, hmm, what's the word?
17:21Taboo.
17:22Taboo, yeah, it's a taboo.
17:24Instead, Andrea named this new species after her mentor.
17:28Paraspharosclera.
17:29I know, it's a pretty big name.
17:32Anyways.
17:33eDNA collected from ARMS is already being used to monitor ecosystems in over 3,000 locations all over the world.
17:41But biodiversity isn't just something to study.
17:44In many cases, it's something scientists are racing to save.
17:48Because over the past few decades, there's been a rapid decline in global biodiversity.
17:54It's just inevitable that some of these insect species are going to go extinct.
17:58And collections like this are going to be the only place where you can find any evidence of their existence.
18:04Tools like eDNA can help scientists detect species before they disappear.
18:10Sometimes, just in time to learn something from them.
18:13And that's critical, because extinction is forever.
18:17That's something Rebecca Johnson knows intimately.
18:20Today, she oversees research at the museum, but has a special place in her heart for a species on the brink.
18:26I feel the same as everyone does about koalas.
18:29I think they're extraordinary creatures.
18:32Many people like to work on koalas because they're so iconic.
18:35They're biologically very interesting.
18:38But they're also really in need of science because there's fairly major conservation concerns for them as a species.
18:47But the Smithsonian collection can be an irreplaceable tool for navigating an uncertain future.
18:53Not everyone has what we have in our collections.
18:56In some cases, we might have the only examples of those specimens in the world.
19:01And scientists are already putting them to work, not just for species conservation, but to protect the systems we all rely on.
19:09If you enjoy food, like we all do, you might not know that we have an insect collection that's used every single day to identify potential pests that are coming into the country that may be a risk to agriculture.
19:25Similarly, the botany collection is used in the same way.
19:28We have a very huge agriculture industry here that this collection directly benefits every single day.
19:35When it comes to defending America's farmland from invasive bugs, Matt Buffington is one of our first lines of defense.
19:42A cicada was like making all this noise.
19:45And then as soon as the cicada killer grabs them and stings them, you hear the kind of
19:52It's a little sad, but that's nature.
19:57In 2019, Matt received an urgent phone call.
20:00A homeowner in Washington state had discovered a freakishly large hornet in their backyard.
20:05And scientists needed to verify what it was as soon as possible.
20:10And when that specimen was on its way here, I had a number of emails and phone calls asking to contact them as soon as it arrived.
20:19I mounted it.
20:20That's one part of the process so I could examine it under the microscope.
20:24And then I went to the collection.
20:26And that's when it dawned on me.
20:28The significance of this is this might be the first record of this species in North America.
20:35And this species is detrimental to honeybee.
20:39And honeybee is a major part of our pollination system for agriculture.
20:44Vespa mandarinia, otherwise known as northern giant hornet, sometimes referred to as the murder hornet.
20:50This invasive species from Asia had the potential to create a $100 million disaster.
20:57Once that comes in and it gets established, you're not getting rid of it.
21:02After Matt's positive ID, entomologists formed a SWAT team suited up in special sting protection suits and went on the hunt for murder hornets.
21:12Then a single hornet tagged with a radio transmitter led them to nest zero, America's first established colony of murder hornets.
21:22A few years ago, this was translocated to the Smithsonian for an exhibit on invasive species to North America.
21:29And it was just in time because of the 202 individuals in the nest, 96 of them were queens, each one capable of establishing a new colony.
21:40So they got them in just the right time.
21:43Nearly five years on, and there hasn't been any new sightings of the murder hornet.
21:48But these aren't the only things the collections are used for.
21:51Fossils can show us how life has adapted to past climate shifts.
21:55And unsequenced genomes might hold the key to drought-resistant crops or life-saving medicines we haven't discovered yet.
22:03If this collection went away, we would lose the knowledge that is the foundation of what we know about biodiversity on the planet.
22:13Preserving that foundation isn't a given. Scientists and institutions like the Smithsonian are facing funding cuts and political pressure.
22:22Behind the headlines, that meant real uncertainty for researchers and staff, and long-term risk to one of the world's most important scientific resources.
22:32Meanwhile, private biotech companies sometimes promise they can reverse extinction with pipettes and computers.
22:39But as any ecologist will tell you, once a species is gone, it's gone.
22:45And no amount of synthetic biology can replace the complexity of real ecosystems.
22:50The clock is ticking. But if the federal government continues to invest in science and preserve what we have now, we might still shape a different future.
23:00I think the urgency is that the technology is so good now.
23:06You can get an excellent quality genome from an old specimen, the kind of specimens that we do tend to have in this collection.
23:15And the questions are really urgent. And so not only do we have the technology to generate the data, we have the need to answer those questions with that data.
23:28So what about the internet rumors about those giant humanoid skeletons?
23:33We have a very large file of people asking that question.
23:37But when we cornered the museum's top director, he set the record straight.
23:41And where are the giant bones?
23:42There's sloth footprints. People thought there were human footprints.
23:45And that started the whole Sasquatch giant thing. But we can't get rid of it.
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