Fish in depth
The renovated Fishes Gallery in the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) replaces a 50-year-old space that school kids used to race through to get to more modern displays and that, in effect, left a fish-shaped hole in the museum’s collections. “The old gallery was horrendous,” said George Lauder, the Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology and curator of ichthyology in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), one of the three research museums that make up the HMNH. “It was really kind of pathetic.” The new gallery, which opened June 2, updates the old in every way, with refurbished cabinets, better lighting, new specimens, and displays that explain both fish biology and the science being conducted on the topic at Harvard. The work was done in honor of Karel Liem, curator of ichthyology at Harvard from 1972 to 2009, who died in 2009 and to whom Lauder credited much of the expansion of Harvard’s...