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]
For three years—2001, 2002 and 2008—on Teopa Beach in Jalisco, Mexico, researchers examined the shell, neck and flippers of female turtles that had come out onto the beach to nest, collecting and carefully documenting all the organisms—known as epibionts—they found. [...more]
Smithsonian scientists and collaborators have determined the evolutionary family tree for one of the most strikingly diverse and endangered bird families in the world, the Hawaiian honeycreepers. [...more]
Halocoryza acapulcana Whitehead (Acapulco Saline Catarrh Beetle), described in 1966 by Donald R. Whitehead. This image is from a recent paper by Terry L. Erwin, entomologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, containing updated information on this and two other previously described species of Halocoryza Alluaud beetles (sea-side beetles of the Indian, Atlantic [...] [...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]
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]
Just as people use airplanes to fly overseas, marine snails may use birds to fly over land,” said Mark Torchin, staff scientist at the Smithsonian. [...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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