The National Zoo has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a captive population of the Virginia big-eared bat at the National Zoo’s Conservation & Research Center near Front Royal, Va. Only 15,000 Virginia big-eared bats remain living in caves in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, and these are threatened by the white-nose syndrome.
Fluorite is well known and prized for its rich variety of colors, most commonly pale green, purple, yellow, orange, blue, pink and colorless. “We acquired this specimen because it is a very nice quality fluorite with an attractive color and it is large enough to be exhibited,” Curator Jeff Post says.
Native to Africa and Madagascar, females of the species have a body length of 1.5 inches and a leg span of 4 to 5 inches. Males are tiny in comparison.
The John Marshall Ju/’hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950-2000, was among 35 documentary heritage items of exceptional value added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009.
With the help of forensic anthropologists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, restoration crews at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. are carefully excavating human remains from burial vaults before making much needed repairs.
A major new exhibition hall dedicated to the discovery and understanding of human origins will open next year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History: The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins
The spread of Africanized honey bees across Central America has had a much smaller impact on native tropical bee species than scientists previously predicted…
Scientists from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo have taken blood samples from thousands of birds and mosquitoes in an effort to track the progress of the West Nile Virus in the eastern United States. Come along in this video as Smithsonian scientists net birds living in downtown Washington, D.C., extract small amounts of blood, and then release them back into the “wild.”
Science Spotlight
