Collecting trips for Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), paleontologist and fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, were often a family affair. This 1910 photograph shows their […]
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The National Zoo has received a breeding pair of Asian small-clawed otters at Asia Trail for the first time. Mac, a three-year-old male from the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Wash., and Smidge, a five-year-old female from the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, arrived in April and are now in their exhibit.
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Five cheetah cubs were born May 28 to 6-year-old Amani at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va. Amani is a dedicated mother according to keepers, who have observed her nursing and grooming the cubs.
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Any adventurer, hiker or backyard naturalist with a camera can help scientists survey and hopefully save the world’s amphibians thanks to a new social networking site that links “citizen scientists” with researchers tracking the decline of amphibians around the globe.
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The recent field of invasion biology faces a new challenge as 19 eminent ecologists issue a call to "end the bias against non-native species" in the journal Nature.
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Smithsonian scientists have confirmed that chytridiomycosis, a rapidly spreading amphibian disease, has reached a site near Panama’s Darien region. This was the last area in the entire mountainous neotropics to be free of the disease. This is troubling news for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, a consortium of nine U.S. and Panamanian institutions that aims to rescue 20 species of frogs in imminent danger of extinction.
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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.
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A scientist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute uses a pick to dislodge the fossil skull of an extinct toothed whale from sediments on the […]
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The whole-genome analysis of two Tasmanian devils—one that died of a new contagious cancer known as Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) and one healthy animal—is at the center of a new management strategy to help prevent the extinction of this species.
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To prevent the loss of Inupiaq words for ice and the knowledge that it embodies, Igor Krupnik, ethnologist at the Arctic Studies Center of the National Museum of Natural History, and Wales native Winton Weyapuk Jr., recently compiled an illustrated dictionary of some 120 Kingikmiut words used in Wales to describe different types of ice.
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Scientists and educators from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and George Mason University broke ground June 29 on a green-design conservation complex that embodies the concept of the living classroom.
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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is hosting a series of public satellite broadcasts featuring a multinational team of researchers, engineers and archaeologists who are working in Peru on the origins and engineering of the Inka Road of South America.
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This image of lawyer Clarence S. Darrow (center) talking with group of men in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925 is one of 10 photographs from […]
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Now, a new study of hellbenders by scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute will place these amphibians at the center of the conservation of Appalachian salamanders.
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Small tissue samples collected from 238 wild turtles at 15 different locations across their range in Southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala revealed a “surprising lack” of genetic structure, the scientists write in a recent paper in the journal Conservation Genetics.
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This is the first report of this invasive species in this area, and may indicate a recent range expansion of the snakehead population.
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On Aug. 10, 1846, U.S. President James K. Polk signed the legislation that established the Smithsonian Institution as a trust administered by a Board of […]
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This Jupiter-sized world reflects less than one percent of the light that falls on it, making it blacker than any planet or moon in our solar system.
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The 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the eastern United States on the afternoon of Tuesday, Aug. 23, caused minor damage to some of the Smithsonian's natural history collections. All public Smithsonian museums are open and have been determined safe for visitors and staff.
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What Google is attempting for books, the University of California, Berkeley, plans to do for the world's vertebrate specimens: store them in "the cloud."
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For the first time in decades, researchers have found a new bird species in the United States. Based on a specimen collected in 1963 on Midway Atoll, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, biologists have described a new species of seabird, Bryan’s shearwater
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The Zoo’s Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., is celebrating the recent hatching of two Micronesian kingfisher (Todiramphus c. cinnamominus) chicks, a female and male, born July 25 and Aug. 20, respectively.
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Now, for the first time scientists at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute have developed a fast and reliable method to date silk.
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University of Florida and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists describe a new 20-foot extinct species of crocodile discovered in the same Colombian coal mine with Titanoboa, the world’s largest snake.
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Two scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have been honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for their innovative research and scientific leadership. It is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
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Our studies of the genetic relationships between these bees tells us that they originated in the Amazon about 22 million years ago and that they moved north into Central America before 3 million years ago.
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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.
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In a new study researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics used DNA from coyote scat (feces) to trace the route that led some of the animals to colonize in Northern Virginia.
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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.
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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 […]
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Smithsonian Anthropologist Bruce Smith shares the origins of some favorite Thanksgiving foods.
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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.
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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 […]
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Suzan Murray, chief veterinary medical officer at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, recently returned from Hanoi, where she led a team of scientists training pathologists from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to better sample, recognize and detect wildlife diseases in hopes of preventing emerging pandemic disease.
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Nearly 20 years after the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute became the first to produce an Eld’s deer fawn through artificial insemination, SCBI scientists have now contributed to the birth of the first Eld’s deer via in vitro fertilization.
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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.
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Researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and other partnering organizations spent two weeks at the end of November collecting sperm and embryonic cells during spawning from two species of coral and have built the first frozen repository for the Great Barrier Reef.
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New research on tiny spiders has revealed that their brains are so large that they fill their body cavities and overflow into their legs, say a team of scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
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Reptiles that live near and feed upon amphibians in the tropics may be spreading the deadly amphibian disease Chytridiomycosis (caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis), holding and transporting reservoirs of the fungus on their skin.
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Both investigations were carried out through DNA analysis of fish tissue performed in a laboratory using a U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol that originated largely at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. DNA from the fish in question was identified by matching it against a database of DNA fish barcodes that again, has its origins at the Smithsonian.
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The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has released the first completely portable bilingual species identification guide for the shore fishes of the tropical Eastern Pacific as a free iPhone application.
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Slithering in at 48 feet long and weighing an estimated one-and-a-half tons, the largest snake the world has ever seen is being brought back to […]
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A baby boom is underway at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Two Guam rail (Gallirallus owstoni) chicks hatched March 3 and 4; they join six others in the Zoo’s collection—three of which live at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va.
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Jeholopsyche liaoningensis is a new genus and species of flying insect from northeastern China, recently revealed in two new fossil specimens.
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Smithsonian astronomers have joined their colleagues from other observatories in a daring new venture: to photograph the giant black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
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When most people look at a forest, they see walking trails, deer yards, or firewood for next winter. But scientists at the Harvard Forest and […]
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The specimen’s skull measures 24 centimeters, roughly the size of a regulation NFL football. The shell which was recovered nearby – and is believed to belong to the same species – measures 172 centimeters, or about 5 feet 7 inches, long.
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Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour.
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Accumulations of drifting snow are the most plausible explanation for the presence of a number of puzzling alluvial fan deposits found inside large impact craters on Mars
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JoVonn Hill, a research associate with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station at Mississippi State University, recently borrowed 32,000 grasshoppers from the Smithsonian’s National […]
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