Somewhere inside the National Museum of Natural History sits the Hope Diamond, forty-five and a half carats of deep blue boron-infused diamond wrapped in a legend of curses and calamity.
The museum opened in 1910 and has grown to hold one hundred forty-five million specimens — everything from moon rocks to dinosaur fossils to dried beetles to pressed flowers collected by Charles Darwin. Only one percent of the collection is ever on display.
The Hope Diamond has a documented history going back to seventeenth-century India, where a large blue diamond was reportedly stolen from the eye of a Hindu idol by a French merchant. It passed through the French royal treasury — Louis XIV wore it as a ceremonial gem — then disappeared during the French Revolution. It reappeared in England decades later, then was purchased by American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose life was indeed marked by tragedy. She sold it to jeweler Harry Winston, who donated it to the Smithsonian in 1958 — by regular mail, insured for one million dollars.
In the rotunda: a fourteen-thousand-pound African bush elephant, the largest land animal specimen on display anywhere in the world, mounted in a charging pose that visitors have been stopping to gape at since 1959.
The museum also holds the bones of the first dinosaur ever scientifically named in North America — an Allosaurus discovered in Colorado in 1869. Natural history, in this building, means literally everything that ever lived.