Molynocoelia erwini, is a new species of fruit fly from Ecuador recently described by USDA entomologist Allen Norrbom, who works in the Systematic Entomology Laboratory of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The discovery of this species in Ecuador extends the known range of the genus Diptera: Tephritidae. It was named [...] [...more]
Ornithologists Carla Dove and Storrs Olson used 700- to 1,100-year-old feathers from a long extinct species of Hawaiian ibis to help determine the bird’s place in the ibis family tree. The feathers are the only known plumage of any of the prehistorically extinct birds that once inhabited the Hawaiian Islands. [...more]
Meet Smithsonian scientist Justin Touchon, a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Justin's work focuses on developmental ecology and reproductive plasticity of the hourglass treefrog (Dendropsophus ebraccatus) and red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas). Justin and his advisor, Karen Warkentin, were the first to have witnessed the frogs laying eggs in water, in addition to doing so on land -- something with major implications for the evolutionary biology of similar creatures. [...more]
DNA analysis has established that creatures captured during a voyage to the mid-Atlantic are members of the Torquaratoridae; a recently discovered family of acorn worms. [...more]
Researchers who will study the microbial communities living on the skins of frogs that are surviving the fungal scourge of chytridiomycosis, deadly to the frogs. [...more]
Studies at two remote Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory sites in Panama and Thailand show the first evidence of long-term effects of nitrogen pollution in tropical trees. [...more]
The first DNA barcoding survey of crustaceans living on samples of dead coral taken from the Indian, Pacific and Caribbean oceans suggests that the diversity of organisms living on the world’s coral reefs—one of the most endangered habitats on Earth—is seriously underestimated. [...more]
Meet Rachel Collin, a staff scientist and director of the Bocas Research Station at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Rachel studies the evolution of marine gastropods (snails) and oversees multiple disciplines of marine biology at the Collin Lab in Bocas del Toro. [...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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