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]
Bruce Smith, anthropology curator at the Smithsonian's Naitonal Museum of Natural History, talks about the Smithsonian explorations in the 1880s to determine who built the ancient earthen mounds in eastern North America. [...more]
This image shows one of three newly discovered North Atlantic deep sea acorn worms–Purple species–recently captured by scientists from deep in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. These worms are members of the family Torquaratoridae. DNA analysis conducted by Karen Osborn of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History confirmed their identity. [...] [...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]
Viewed from inside the SOMATOM Emotion 6CT scanner used at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the skeleton and internal organs of this well-preserved Peruvian mummy can now be studied non-destructively and non-invasively. CT scanners are fundamentally changing the way scientists examine museum specimens. The SOMATOM Emotion 6CT scanner was recently donated to the Smithsonian by [...] [...more]
A fragment of whale rib found in a North Carolina strip mine is offering scientists a rare glimpse at the interactions between prehistoric sharks and whales some 3- to 4- million years ago during the Pliocene. [...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]
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]
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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