The National Zoo has received a breeding pair of Asian small-clawed otters at Asia Trail for the first time. Mac, a three-year-old male from the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Wash., and Smidge, a five-year-old female from the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, arrived in April and are now in their exhibit. [...more]
The National Zoo’s great cat program recently expanded with the arrival of two-and-a-half-year-old female Sumatran tiger, Damai, who is now out of quarantine and spending time outside in her exhibit where visitors can see her. [...more]
The pendant took Grand Prize in the National Saul Bell Design Competition in 2008 and features a beautiful 3.76-ct pink tourmaline from Nigeria. [...more]
Faced with insufficient time and inadequate library resources to tackle the problem on their own, they instead posted a catalog of specimen images to Facebook and turned to their network of colleagues for help. [...more]
Meet Sahelanthropus tchadensis. This newly unveiled bust by artist John Gurche is now on view in the the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. [...more]
The words “box jelly” may bring to mind something sweet and tasty, but the banded box jelly of Bonaire is a highly venomous jellyfish with a sting that can inflict serious pain. Recently discovered in the waters off the island of Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean, this strong swimming creature has distinct brown to reddish-orange [...] [...more]
A. sediba was discovered in 2008 in the Malapa Cave at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site located outside Johannesburg. [...more]
This Yowah Nut Opal comes from Queensland, Australia and consists of precious opal deposits enclosed in an ironstone nodule. A recent gift to the Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection from the Richard Ashley Foundation, the play-of-color in this opal is spectacular, with flashes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. For a full description, visit [...] [...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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