Creative minds are increasingly turning to nature—banyan
tree leaves, butterfly wings, a bird's beak— for fresh design solutions
The first thing you notice about the entomology collections
department, Lepidoptera division, at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural
History is a faint, elusively familiar odor. Mothballs. I briefly contemplated
the cosmic irony of mothballs in a room full of moths (and butterflies, a
lineage of moths evolved to fly during the day) before turning to Bob Robbins,
a research entomologist. “There are many insects that will eat dried insects,”
he said, “so traditionally you kept those pests out using naphthalene, or
mothballs.”