One of the world’s most endangered species—a brown kiwi Apteryx mantelli—hatched at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo’s Bird House, early Tuesday morning, March 30. [...more] (Photo by Mehgan Murphy) [...more]
What they observed was unique among all bird species: successful male caribs maintained and defended territories with nectar supplies that were two to five times greater than their daily needs and also isolated part of their crop for the exclusive feeding rights of visiting females. [...more]
Based on decades of cutting-edge research, the 15,000-square-foot Hall of Human Origins offers visitors an immersive, interactive journey through 6 million years of human evolution spelling out how defining characteristics of the human species have evolved during millions of years in response to a changing world. [...more]
Artist John Gurche used the latest forensic techniques, fossil discoveries, and 20 years of experience to create the lifelike reconstructions of early humans on display in the National Museum of Natural History's new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. [...more]
Recently, scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama discovered that the brain region responsible for learning and memory is larger in the social queens than in the solitary queens of this species. Their study is the first comparison of the brain sizes of social and non-social individuals of the same species. [...more]
The research and patience has paid off. The sisters, Nababiep and Shera, have spent short periods of time with the male, Luke, individually and simultaneously. This happened only after they each had spent more than a year sniffing Luke through a mesh door (called a “howdy door”). [...more]
The Stephen L. Wood collection brings the collection of bark beetles held in the Natural History Museum’s Department of Entomology to an impressive 180,000 specimens, making it one of the most extensive collections in world. [...more]
“Two things appear to be going on here,” explains Jacobus Boomsma, professor at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at STRI. “Right after mating there is competition between sperm from different males. Sperm is expendable. Later, sperm becomes very precious to the female who will continue to use it for many years to fertilize her own eggs, producing the millions of workers it takes to maintain her colony.” [...more]
This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.
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