It’s been nicknamed the “Rosetta Stone” of marine life: a collection of over 6 million species of fish and other oceanic organisms, sitting in a Smithsonian storage and research facility just outside D.C.
In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” we’re getting an exclusive look inside the National Museum of Natural History’s “Ocean Library,” located at the Museum Support Center — where the museum stores its reserve collections not on display to the public — in Suitland, Maryland.
The library started out with the goal of collecting every single U.S. species known to humans, but now, scientists are trying to make this facility into a worldwide repository for all marine life, where every known ocean species is cataloged and recorded for all time.
This collection boasts some of the rarest fish in the world, from some of the most remote depths of our oceans, and scientists from across the globe come to the D.C. region to access its contents.
During our visit, we saw everything from 15-foot sharks to 10-foot manta rays; fish and other organisms discovered hundreds of years ago, all the way up to newly discovered marine species from just the past couple months.
And while this collection is breathtaking in itself, it’s what scientists are doing with these specimens — and how researching/cataloging them can help our understanding of our planet — that make the Ocean Library truly special.
Enjoy this video exploration, and tune in next Tuesday for Part 2, where we’ll show you how scientists are extracting DNA samples from the specimens here and logging them into a digital database to give each species its own genetic bar code of sorts!
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