What Natural History Objects Represent Your State? You Can Find Out in This New Exhibition of More Than 600 Specimens and Artifacts

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History celebrates America’s 250th anniversary by spotlighting fascinating items from across the nation

Marta Hill | Freelance contributor

June 18, 2026 10:15 a.m.

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Inside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is a room that brings together objects from all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and five territories. In the stunning collection are a Menominee dugout canoe from Wisconsin, megalodon teeth from North Carolina, a walrus-tusk carving from Alaska and twinned gold crystals from Nevada.

The objects are among an assortment of more than 600 featured in the museum’s new exhibition, “From These Lands: Sharing Our Natural and Cultural Heritage,” open now through 2029. The exhibition, along with its complementary book of the same name, showcases the intersections of natural and cultural history in the United States, through the lens of the museum’s immense collections.

“Natural history is everything,” says Torben Rick, an archaeologist at the museum and a co-curator of the exhibition. “It’s the rocks that are around you. It’s the trees that grow now or grew in the past. Fishes that swim in the lakes, rivers, streams and oceans. It’s us. It’s who we are and all the various, different things that we do and the ways we interact with our environment.”

A paleobiologist at the museum and an exhibition co-curator, Stewart Edie adds, “This show is about how we are rooted in the natural world. It’s easy to become familiar with the landscapes around us, and they can tend to fade into the background, but I think that this exhibit really pulls on our vast collections to inject some new life and meaning into those places.”

The exhibition and book, both to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, are focused on finding connections, which has been at the heart of “From These Lands” from its very inception, Edie notes. “It was a process that actually started by asking people across the museum how they connected to their sense of place and where they were born, they grew up or they live now,” he says. “That led to hundreds of ideas coming in about items in the collections and the stories that were tied to them.”

In the process of whittling the hundreds of suggestions from Smithsonian staff down to the pieces in the final display, Edie and Rick searched for the most compelling stories and overarching themes.

“It’s not just that this petrified wood is from Arizona, or this fossilized sea star is from Minnesota,” Edie says. “It’s that when you consider them all together, it gives us a sense of how dynamic the landscape has been.”

For Edie, the fossilized tree trunk from Arizona’s Navajo County serves as a reminder of how unexpectedly intertwined parts of the environment are. “Not only is it just a dizzying array of colors—it’s beautiful—but when you start to look very closely around the edges, you see little bits of other fossils and marine fossils, and so you start to wonder, how did that happen?” Edie says.

It turns out, those marine fossils formed upstream and then washed downstream, where they were trapped by the wood millions of years later.

The book presents photographs of more than 100 of the exhibition’s objects. Angela Roberts Reeder, a writer and an editor in the Office of Exhibits and the lead on the book, notes that the images reveal the surprising appeal and charisma of some of the more unsung items.

Particularly, an image of gypsum sand from New Mexico stands out to Roberts Reeder because of how light and movement create visual interest. “When you see that photo, you’re like, ‘Whoa, who knew that sand could be so beautiful?’” Roberts Reeder says.

Another favorite of Roberts Reeder’s, a brittle star intertwined with octocoral, combines photography and scientific illustration to illuminate details that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious to the viewer.

“The thing about preserved specimens is, over time, they start to lose their color,” Roberts Reeder says. “It’s difficult to be able to see the brittle starfish intertwined in the coral. But we’re very lucky in that we have a scientific illustration that was hand-colored, and so you really can see in the drawing the brittle star. Then you can go back to the specimen and look more closely.”

Not all the objects in “From These Lands” are strictly naturally occurring—Rick’s anthropology expertise allowed the curators to tie in human influence. For example, one area of the exhibition is dedicated to blacksmithing tools from Guam.

The objects tell the story of a CHamoru blacksmith, Joaquin Flores Lujan, a U.S. naval welder and an immigration officer. He trained over a dozen blacksmiths in the traditional CHamoru practices. The displayed tools, made in Mangilao, are still connected to nature: A pair of scissors was used to trim betel nuts, and a machete helped clear and transform the land.

Edie hopes that “From These Lands” will give visitors—and readers—a chance to think about their own regions and how these landscapes, which are “always changing,” he says, fit into the bigger picture of the country and the world.

“If we live in an urban area, it is sometimes easy to forget that everything that we are, and everything that we have in this world is due to where we live,” Roberts Reeder says. “We live on this planet, and everything comes from the world that we live on.”

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Marta Hill is a science journalist based in New York City and a former intern at Smithsonian magazine. She is a part of the 2025 class of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Her work has appeared in the Transmitter, Eos, Boston.com and more.