Museum-goers can start on the first floor by exploring the 5,000-square-foot Insectarium. The new paean to bugs features a slew of digital exhibits and maps, along with artfully pinned butterflies ...

A gallery at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is crawling with beetles: snout beetles, also called weevils; ground beetles, which live in dirt; scarab beetles, as shiny as metal; stag bee… ...

Jessica Ware, an associate curator for the American Museum of Natural History, waxes rhapsodic about beetles. She thinks cockroaches get a bad rap.

The museum also has two beetles collected by naturalist Charles Darwin, along with some of the heaviest beetles in the world, weighing up to 4 ounces – or ¼ pound. “They’re good to eat.

But at natural history museums like the Burke, scientists intervene in the decomposition. Otherwise the beetles will eat the bones. They’ll eat everything, really.

The museum also has two beetles collected by naturalist Charles Darwin, along with some of the heaviest beetles in the world, weighing up to 4 ounces – or ¼ pound. “They’re good to eat.