{"id":9314,"date":"2018-11-06T12:54:40","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T17:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=9314"},"modified":"2018-11-21T09:42:13","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T14:42:13","slug":"beetles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/11\/06\/beetles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dazzling \u2018Rockefeller Beetles\u2019 Debut At Harvard\u2019s Natural History Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

The earth is home to 450,000 species of beetles, Brian Farrell, the Harvard University professor and curator of entomology, told me recently as he was pulling out drawers of the insects in the storage halls of Harvard\u2019s Museum of Comparative Zoology\u00a0in Cambridge. “That makes them the largest group of organisms on the planet. One out of every four animal species is a beetle.”<\/p>\n

Farrell organized the\u00a0Harvard Museum of Natural History’s new \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d<\/a> exhibit, found in a corner of the museum’s “Arthropods: Creatures that Rule” gallery. It showcases hundreds of beetles selected from the 150,000 specimens representing 10,000 species that were donated to the museum last year by banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller (1915-2017)\u2014grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller and one of the heirs to the fortune accumulated by the family\u2019s oil, banking and real estate businesses.<\/p>\n

The exhibit features rows and rows of shimmering emerald jewel beetles, bronze ground beetles, green and red frog leg beetles, and green scarab beetles decorated with pale yellow dots.<\/p>\n

\"Scarab<\/a>
Scarab beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\u201cWhat you see as the shininess on their backs are their front wings,\u201d Farrell explains. They\u2019re composed of a hard chitin that shields their delicate wings inside, which “allows beetles to go where other animals can\u2019t go because they have this protection for their wings.\u201d So beetles can burrow underground or bore into trees. \u201cThat\u2019s the one striking things about beetles that\u2019s obvious once you say it, but that\u2019s easily overlooked\u2014this protective layer they\u2019ve evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jewel<\/a>
Jewel beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Harvard University in the 1930s, David Rockefeller gave natural history walks while (mainly) studying economics. “He took graduate level entomology his first year and got an A,” Farrell says. “That was his only A at Harvard.” Rockefeller served as an intelligence officer in Algeria during World War II. \u201cHe did a lot of collecting there,\u201d Farrell says. Rockefeller would go on to be president of Chase Manhattan Bank, in which the family owned a major stake.<\/p>\n

Rockefeller collected beetles himself, planning expeditions to Asia, Africa, Costa Rica, and hired others to collect for him. \u201cHe would always have beetle collecting jars wherever he went,\u201d Farrell says. Rockefeller bought specimens and traded, he purchased a major collection from Spain. \u201cHe had 75,000 when we met and by the time he passed away 20 years later it had doubled,\u201d Farrell says. \u201cIt was his longest continued passion throughout his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

“He took insects as a lens into how the world works,” Farrell says, \u201cespecially on the natural history side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Longhorn<\/a>
Longhorn beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harvard\u2019s collection, Farrell says, includes \u201c7.5 million insects and half of them are beetles. It’s the most important collection in North America. Not because of its size, but because of its age,” Farrell says. Harvard’s collection includes 14,000 beetle types. “Most of the beetle types were described in the 1800s and because we’re so old we have the original specimens.” In other words, Harvard has the very beetles\u2014the individual dead bugs\u2014that have come to define all these different types of beetles. “They’ll designate one or two specimens as the type. By definition these specimens belong to those species.”<\/p>\n

Rockefeller’s collection, Ferrell says, “adds a series of specimens and species that we don’t have much representation from, especially Brazil and Africa. … Specimens you couldn’t collect today because of vanishing ecosystems or excessively complex permitting rules.”<\/p>\n

\"Ground<\/a>
Ground beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among Rockefeller\u2019s rare specimens are tiger beetles. \u201cThey\u2019re hard to catch because they have great big eyes and they can see you coming and their fast flyers,\u201d Farrell says.<\/p>\n

Farrell first met Rockefeller at his home near Tarrytown, New York, where he had cabinets in basement rooms filled with hundreds of boxes of beetles. A sign of Rockefeller’s seriousness as a beetle collector is that he had not just got one group\u2014say, the colorful ones\u2014but also “he has all the diversity of all the little brown jobs,” Farrell says. Thousands of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rarest things are the little tiny brown jobs,\u201d Farrell tells me. \u201cThey\u2019re not spectacular. They\u2019re tiny, they\u2019re hard to collect, and it\u2019s hard to see what\u2019s going on underground. \u2026 That\u2019s really what most beetles are, most beetles are little brown jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Jewel<\/a>
Jewel beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Ground<\/a>
Ground beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Frog<\/a>
Frog leg beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Click<\/a>
Click beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"A<\/a>
A scarab beetle in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Jewel<\/a>
Jewel beetles in the \u201cThe Rockefeller Beetles\u201d exhibition at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History in Cambridge. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The earth is home to 450,000 species of beetles, Brian Farrell, the Harvard University professor and curator of entomology, told me recently as he was pulling out drawers of the insects in the storage halls of Harvard\u2019s Museum of Comparative Zoology\u00a0in Cambridge. “That makes them the largest group of organisms on the planet. One out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[42,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9314"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9387,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314\/revisions\/9387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}