Digitizing microscope slides can uncover billions of fossils for natural history

Approximately 145 million: That's the number of specimens—including plants, animals, minerals, and human artifacts—curators estimate are held in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. However, these estimates do not reflect the billions of tiny individual specimens contained on microscope slides—thin pieces of glass that fix objects in place for observation—each representing a record of a species at a specific place and time.