The museum is housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It displays a sampling of specimens drawn from the collections of the University's three natural history research museums: the Harvard University Herbaria the Museum of Comparative Zoology the Harvard Mineralogical Museum. The museum is physically connected to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at 26 Oxford Street. This museum is the most visited museum at Harvard University. The museum starting collecting in 1858, and the current collection is about 21 million specimens.