When citizens of the newly established United States were getting down to business in their unfamiliar surroundings, they had a long to-do list. One of those tasks was figuring out what all the species around them were.

So, in the late 1700s, a group of Boston physicians and other educated men created a society dedicated to the "collection of a regular and systematick Museum of Natural History." They felt an urgency to name and to catalog, well, just about every natural thing, and to be "instrumental in throwing some light on the natural history of this country."

In 1814, the New England Society for the Promotion of Natural History became the Linnaean Society, named for Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist/zoologist whose method of nomenclature evolved into our modern taxonomy system.

Society members gathered every Saturday evening, arranged lectures and led expeditions, dividing their work into six classes: "minerals; plants and vegetables; quadrupeds and birds; fishes, reptiles, and serpents; insects; and vermes [worms], corals, madrepores [another kind of coral]." Members spent much of their time collecting and preserving specimens from around the wilds of New England and instructed the public to collect the "curiosities" found in their travels (both in their own country and abroad) and drop them off at a downtown drugstore.

The media was involved too. The last line of an 1817 Boston Daily Messenger article about a wildcat spotted in Andover read: "We hope the gentleman who has the skin of this Animal, will present it to the Linnaean Society in this town."

That same year, the society gained more notoriety when a mysterious sea beast was alleged to be swimming near Gloucester. Springing into action, the Linnaeans assembled a team to investigate. They published an elaborate pamphlet describing what they believed to be a turtle-headed animal. While some agreed the creature existed, others mocked the pamphlet and the society. The debate—and more sightings—continued, but members returned to the more elemental duties of getting to know their surroundings—measuring the height of Mount Monadnock, figuring the limits of the timberline, and collecting an enormous variety of animals, vegetables, and minerals.

In 1820, the group formed a museum in the Boylston Market (just down the hall from the Handel and Haydn Society) to house their growing collection, which by then included two live tigers. Also on display were stuffed "Lion, Leopard, Catamount, Wolf, Bear, Stag, Sea-Elephant, and a great number of smaller species, principally native."

The busy founding members were drawn in other directions—including creating the Boston Society of Natural History in 1830—and they closed the doors of the Linnaean Society. The thousands of specimens were given to the Boston Society's museum, which divided the collections between Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the brand-new Museum of Science, Boston in 1951. Today, you can still find many of these curiosities on display—some with their original handwritten tags—at the Museum of Science and at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.