At Harvard’s natural-history museum, a fish mummified inside an oyster sits in the same exhibition as a Komodo dragon skull linked by curators to the real-world expedition behind King Kong. The display also includes an articulated dodo and a butterfly whose wings carry male markings on one side and female markings on the other. These are not movie props. They are real specimens with stories stranger than most fictional artifacts.
The fish is the kind of detail that makes a museum visit stop mid-sentence. A pearlfish species can shelter inside an oyster; in a shell dating to about 1856, one was preserved inside layers of mother-of-pearl. Harvard’s display describes it as a “gruesome, fish-shaped pearl.” Nearby, a Komodo skull points toward a 1926 expedition said to have helped inspire the giant-monster story that reached movie screens seven years later.
Harvard Gazette writer Anna Lamb reported on the objects September 23 in a story about “Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries,” an exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The exhibit opened June 27 and is scheduled to run through April 2027, so this is a closer look at what is on display—not a claim that the collection just opened this week.
The oyster contains the exhibit’s strangest surprise
Pearlfish live in a relationship with certain sea cucumbers and mollusks, sometimes using the interior of an oyster as shelter. The Harvard specimen’s story takes that behavior in an unexpected direction: an oyster from around 1856 contains a pearlfish mummified inside layers of mother-of-pearl. The museum does not describe it as an intentional preservation project. It is an unusual natural specimen, displayed as a curiosity.
The image is almost too neat to be true: a fish inside an oyster, surrounded by the material we normally associate with pearls. But the appeal is not just a clever visual. The object turns a familiar bit of marine biology—an animal seeking shelter—into a rare record of what can happen when a small organism and a mollusk occupy the same space for a very long time.
It also gives readers a concrete reason to look at the museum’s photograph rather than take a headline on faith. Harvard’s image shows the specimen itself. The generated feature illustration accompanying this article is only an illustration; it is not a picture of the Harvard object.
Harvard’s Komodo skull has a King Kong connection
The exhibit’s Komodo dragon skull comes with a carefully worded piece of film history. Harvard says the skull is said to be from a hunt connected to the expedition that inspired King Kong. According to the exhibit’s curators, the 1933 film’s screenwriter drew inspiration from a 1926 expedition to Komodo that brought back dragon specimens, including Harvard’s.
That does not mean a Komodo dragon was the monster in the movie, or that the skull can be proven to have been the single object that sparked the screenplay. The connection runs through the expedition and the specimens it brought to public attention. That is still a satisfying real-world link: a remote island expedition, a dramatic species, and a movie about an expedition to capture a monster.
The distinction between evidence and lore makes the story better, not weaker. A skull can anchor a documented expedition without turning a curator’s account of inspiration into a certainty about one screenwriter’s process. The useful question is how a real creature and expedition helped shape the cultural imagination around an invented giant ape.
The dodo and half-and-half butterfly add two more surprises
The exhibition’s articulated dodo is another recognizable specimen whose story extends beyond a silhouette on a children’s book. The species disappeared after people reached Mauritius, and Harvard’s display gives visitors a chance to encounter an assembled specimen at full scale. Its presence also links the show’s oddities to a serious natural-history mission: collections preserve evidence of life that can no longer be observed in the wild.
Then there is a blue morpho butterfly displaying bilateral gynandromorphism. One wing shows male markings and the other female markings. Harvard’s museum spokesperson says this condition occurs in roughly one out of every 10,000 butterflies. In a gallery, the result can look like two specimens joined down the middle, but it is one animal displaying characteristics associated with both sexes.
Put together, the objects offer a set of unusually good “wait, what?” moments: a fish inside an oyster, a skull linked to a legendary monster movie, a dodo, and a butterfly with two different visual identities. The pieces are not connected by one grand theory. Their shared thread is that close observation makes the natural world feel more surprising than a cabinet label can suggest.
A cabinet of curiosities with real evidence behind it
“Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries” draws on Harvard’s natural-history collections, which include more than 26 million objects. Many of the items in the exhibition are being shown publicly for the first time. That scale matters because each oddity is also a piece of evidence: specimens help researchers study biodiversity, geological history and the changes that have shaped life.
The King Kong connection makes a strong doorway for pop-culture readers, but the exhibition’s real payoff is broader. It lets a movie mystery sit beside an astonishing marine specimen and a biological variation you might otherwise assume was invented for a fantasy creature. If the exhibit works, a visitor leaves wanting to inspect the label, question the backstory and see what other surprises have been hiding in museum storage.
Sources: Harvard Gazette, “Curios and curiouser” (Sept. 23, 2026); Harvard Museum of Natural History: “Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries”.
