The National Museum of Natural History is renowned for its iconic objects like the Hope Diamond and the Nation’s T. rex. With so many spectacular specimens, it could be easy to miss the museum’s wood collection. Which wood be a big mistake as these scientific samples form one of the world’s most important assemblages of lumber. “At the Museum Support Center, our collections storage facility in Maryland, we have about 43,000 wood specimens spanning over 3,000 genera — that makes us the second largest wood collection, or xylarium, in the United States and fifth largest in the world,” said research botanist Kenneth Wurdack, the curator of the museum’s wood collections. …The museum’s collections are a vital source for preservation of rare and extinct species, and woods are no exception. Unfortunately, threats like deforestation linked to agriculture and urbanization, as well as introduced diseases, have decimated the populations of several species of trees.