Only some Indian artifacts and other ethnological exhibits were ready when some 1,600 curious guests made their way through the bronze doors of the Natural History Building on March 17, 1910. The star attraction was the Smithsonian’s art collection, installed in one of the building’s central galleries where it was to remain for almost 60 years. [...more]
Smithsonian scientists and colleagues, however, have recently found evidence that gymnosperm plants shared an intricate pollination relationship with scorpionfly insects 62 million years before flowering plants appear in fossil records. [...more]
The fossil teeth of a 15- to 18-million-year-old three-toed browsing horse, Anchitherium clarencei, were recently discovered by scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Florida. They found the teeth during excavations of newly exposed rock in the earthworks of the Panama Canal. Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum [...] [...more]
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama was recently given a collection of more than 25,000 different pollen grains and spores, each mounted on a microscope slide and labeled according to the plant that produced it. “The collection is worldwide in coverage with an emphasis on plants of the Americas,” explains collection donor Alan Graham, professor emeritus at Kent State University and curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden. [...more]
This short video of an ocelot was taken by Smithsonian scientists during a recent camera-trap survey of these animals in the Peruvian Amazon.[...more]
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