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POPSGlass Animals
Long overshadowed by their famed floral kin, some of the exquisite 19th century glass animals housed at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) have finally hit the road for a Minnesota exhibit - the first time in Harvard's nearly 130-year ownership that the rare sculptures are known to have left Cambridge. The exhibit of 29 invertebrate models, dubbed "The Glass Sea Treasures of Harvard: The Age of Darwin," continues through next February at the Underwater Adventures Aquarium in Bloomington, Minn. At that time, the newly cleaned and restored creatures are expected to migrate eastward en masse for a possible exhibition on campus. Harvard's invertebrate models were crafted by a father-and-son team of German artisans, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, members of a family whose glassmaking secrets dated to the 15th century. Over five decades starting in 1886, the Blaschkas went on to craft the Harvard Museum of Natural History's renowned array of more than 3,000 glass flowers.