With the gift of a Siemens SOMATOM Emotion 6 CT scanner from Siemens Healthcare, Smithsonian researchers are acquiring information about museum objects that is fundamentally changing the way scientists examine specimens [...more]
In a new study researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics used DNA from coyote scat (feces) to trace the route that led some of the animals to colonize in Northern Virginia. [...more]
Adding wings to a robotic bug helped it run faster and better, but was it enough to achieve takeoff? [...more]
It is one of the rarest shrubs in the southeastern United States but for scientists trying to save it, the critically endangered Michaux’s sumac (Rhus michauxii) is not cooperating. [...more]
A new study on the dodo’s island home of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, paints a picture of this unusual bird as an intrepid survivor on par with the giant tortoise for its resiliency. [...more]
These green crabs have been doing a number on native shellfish. They eat a lot of clams. And they're a very cosmopolitan species—they've now spread all over, to places as far afield as the West Coast of the U.S. and South Africa. [...more]
History and geology, not current ecology, are likely what has made tropical forests so variable from site to site. [...more]
Depending on where the fish disperse from, the use of ‘stepping stones', flotsam or simply being an adult can help in the journey to find a new home. [...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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