Department of Entomology

Cosmisoma titania Bates (illustration from the Electronic Biologia Centrali-Americana)

drawers of insects wasp

The U.S. National Entomological Collection ranks as the second
largest insect collection in the world with approximately 35 million specimens including over 100,000 holotypes plus hundreds of thousands of additional paratypes and other secondary types. dragonfly

The collection includes over 300,000 species representing approximately 60% of known insect families. With specimens from locations worldwide, the collections are second to none in coverage for the Nearctic and Neotropical regions. Specimens from the Old World are also well represented, especially from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. Particular strengths include mosquitoes, wasps, beetles, butterflies and moths, and flies. Although the bulk of the collection is kept dry, various groups—such as spiders—are stored in alcohol.

The collections are typically arranged by taxon; lower centipede categories(genus,species) are arranged alphabetically,and for select taxa, they are further organized by country of origin within each species. While the majority of the collection is housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, some groups are held at other research facilities in nearby Maryland, including the USDA's Beltsville Agricutural Research Center and the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Support Center. The U.S. National Tick Collection was moved in1990 to the Institute of Arthropodology and Parasitology at Georgia Southern University on a long-term enhancement loan.