Today, Marra is helping launch an Animal Mortality Monitoring Program in Africa intended to serve as an early warning system for emerging infectious diseases that can pass from animal populations into the human population. [...more]
For the first time, researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Migratory Bird Center analyzed how songbirds are affected by both general noise and the acoustics of hard human-made surfaces in urban areas. [...more]
Illustrations of the nest and eggs of birds of Ohio was published in the small town of Circleville, Ohio, from 1879 to 1886 through the dedicated efforts of the family and friends of a young woman named Genevieve Jones. Despite being produced not just by amateurs but largely by women, far from the publishing houses [...] [...more]
A team of scientists have found that because of this, high summer temperatures have been a strong influence in determining bill size in some birds, particularly species of sparrows that favor salt marshes. [...more]
Bird species in rainforest fragments in Brazil that were isolated by deforestation first disappeared and then reappeared during the next quarter-century. [...more]
Some--birds called wire-tailed manakins, residents of tropical forests in the Americas--are cooperators as well as competitors. They cooperate, forming alliances for a common cause. [...more]
A description and photos of the green-headed tanager (Tangara seledon), a bird native to east-central South America, can be found in the Species of the Day Archive of the Encyclopedia of Life. This tanager is one of several extravagantly multicolored tanagers found in one or another part of eastern Brazil. The Encyclopedia of Life [...] [...more]
BROOKINGS, S.D. — Julie DeJong can’t set foot on the ground of an Oregon marsh to gather duck eggs on a spring day in 1875. But Charles Bendire did. And thanks to a research project that is the next best thing to time travel, DeJong is measuring the duck eggs in a number of museum collections, [...] [...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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