• Moth exhibit coming to the American Museum of Natural History

    Jim des Rivières

    A Scarlet-winged Lichen Moth (Hypoprepia miniata) with a wingspread of 30 millimeters.

    Press release excerpt — Winged Tapestries: Moths at Large, an exhibition of 34 striking images of moths, opens Sept. 29 at the American Museum of Natural History. The exhibition displays the arresting beauty and surprising diversity of moths from Ottawa-based photographer Jim des Rivières.

    To create these larger-than-life images, des Rivières scans each moth specimen at a resolution of 4,800 pixels per inch.

    With some 3.5 million specimens, the Museum’s collection of moths and butterflies is among the five largest in the world.

    Learn more at the American Museum of Natural History amnh.org

    Jim des Rivières

    A female Luna Moth (Actias luna) with a wingspread of 101 millimeters.

    Jim des Rivières

    An Io Moth (Automeris io) with a wingspread of 64 millimeters.

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  • Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

    A man looks at a display in the newly opened wet collections at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin on Sept 13, 2010. Some 276,000 exhibits make up the wet collections including a temperature-controlled exhibition room with around 85,000 specimens of animals preserved in alcohol.

    The Wet Collections

    The museum and its collections were damaged by Allied bombing during WWII. The eastern wing was severely damaged, and has only now been rebuilt to house the Wet Collection.