Museum of Comparative Zoology
natural history museum at Harvard University
The Museum of Comparative Zoology (formally the Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology and often abbreviated to MCZ) is a zoology museum located on the grounds of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is one of three natural-history research museums at Harvard, whose public face is the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Harvard MCZ's collections consist of some 21 million specimens, of which several thousand are on rotating public display. While the research collections of the MCZ are not open to the public, the museum maintains MCZbase, a public database of its zoological collections.
Many of the exhibits in the public museum have not only zoological interest, but also historical significance. Past exhibits have featured a fossil sand dollar collected by Charles Darwin in 1834, a mamo collected by Captain James Cook, and two golden pheasants that once belonged to George Washington.
Gonzalo Giribet, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, has served as the museum's director since 2021.
History
The Museum of Comparative Zoology was founded in 1859 through the efforts of zoologist Louis Agassiz; the museum used to be referred to as "The Agassiz" after its founder. Agassiz designed the collection to illustrate the variety and comparative relationships of animal life. According to Goodale, "What he had in mind, as indicated by hints in his reports and other communications, was a museum for research and illustration in all departments of what was then called natural history.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1420782. VIAF identifies the subject as 134682709. The Library of Congress control number is n80020339. Authority coordinates are 42.379, -71.116. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 2021 and 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Museum of Comparative Zoology” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.