What can we learn from a dinosaur feather preserved in amber? Let’s go behind the scenes of the Museum’s collection of amber fossils to find out!
Mantises may be some of the most out-of-this-world-looking critters on Earth, but they’re uniquely adapted to life on this planet. These incredible hunters have repeatedly evolved into “ecomorphs”—groups that aren’t closely related, but share incredible adaptations to similar habitats. These dazzling displays of convergence may have something to tell us about evolution.
In the latest episode of Insectarium, join host and Museum Curator Jessica Ware as she visits mantis expert and graduate student Lohit Garikipati at the Towson University Mantis Lab to see how researchers are using high-speed infrared cameras to track the movements of mantis prey capture. The similarities (and differences) in hunting techniques can help reveal how environments shape the animals that live in them.
Research alert! New insights into mammalian tooth, jaw, and ear evolution, gleaned from analyzing fossils of two Jurassic-era mammal species from China, are reshaping how scientists think about early mammals. This research, led by scientists at the Museum and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, focuses on two new species of fossil mammals—Feredocodon chowi and Dianoconodon youngi—that offer new evidence about early mammalian evolution.
“Scientists have been trying to understand how the mammalian middle ear evolved since Darwin’s time,” said Jin Meng, a curator in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and a corresponding author on both papers. “These new fossils bring to light a critical missing link and enrich our understanding of the gradual evolution of the mammalian middle ear.”
Image: Chuang Zhao
How do trauma, poverty, and racial discrimination influence our health? What about our evolutionary history causes our bodies to respond in this way? Biological anthropologist Zaneta Thayer explores the biological mechanisms through which early life stress influences biology and health later on.
Source: SoundCloud / Science at AMNH
The Mural of Primate Evolution shows vignettes from 50 million years of primate evolution with detailed depictions of early primates and habitats.
A panorama in five parts features major events in primate evolution. Artist Jay Matternes marries art and science to show a lost world.
A new study of fossilized dinosaur embryos suggests that the young of these prehistoric animals were slow to develop, with some spending up to sixth months inside their eggs before hatching. Detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this drawn-out development cycle not only surprised scientists—it may have contributed to the downfall of the dinosaurs.
“We know very little about dinosaur embryology, yet it relates to so many aspects of development, life history, and evolution,” said study co-author Mark Norell, Macaulay Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “This work is a great example of how new technology and new ideas can be brought to old problems.”
Using a combination of computed tomography (CT) scanning and powerful microscopes, Norell and colleagues from the University of Calgary and Florida State University examined the teeth of fossilized dinosaur embryos in unprecedented detail, shining new light on specimens about which not much is known.
Islands like Cuba are like natural experiments, where evolution becomes more dramatic!
Its complex politics and vibrant music have attracted the attention of the world. But Cuba, the largest island nation in the Caribbean, is also home to the unexpected. It’s a place of stunning contrasts: mysterious caves and bright boulevards, sweltering fields and cool forests, hard challenges and high energy.
Su política compleja y su música vibrante han atraído la atención del mundo. Pero Cuba, la nación más grande del Caribe, también es el hogar de lo inesperado. Es un lugar de contrastes asombrosos: cuevas mysteriosas y bulevares radiantes, campos de calor sofocante y frescos bosques, grandes desafíos y gran energía.
When modern humans migrated out of Africa between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, they encountered and bred with Neanderthals, our close relatives living in Europe and Asia. For people of non-African descent, approximately 2 percent of their genome has some Neanderthal DNA. Recent research is investigating which components of the Neanderthal genome survive today—and what traits they influence.
Over on the Darwin Manuscripts Project website, visitors can peruse thousands of Charles Darwin’s writings. These record Charles Darwin's work as a practicing scientist. Whether you are a student or a researcher, access the primary evidence for the birth and maturation of Darwin's attempts to explore and explain the natural world.
Though feathers first evolved for other functions, their ultimate adaptation is in the bird wing. Feathers are great for making light, sturdy, adjustable airfoils—the curved wing shapes that provide lift, and ultimately, flight. True flight is different from gliding. Animals capable of true flight can keep themselves in the air by their own power, supporting their weight by flapping. Gliding is more like a slow, controlled descent, as if guiding a parachute.
This week's #TrilobiteTuesday examines the last trilobites, those that existed at the end of these ancient arthropod's 270 million year run through evolutionary time. The species that represented the end of the noble trilobite line were all proetids that lived during the Mississippian, Pennsylvanian and Permian periods. These were certainly not the biggest, baddest or boldest examples of their class. Yet even considering their diminutive size (usually an inch of less) and their modest, simplistic, generally ovate body plan–a design that allowed them to burrow beneath the sea floor mud in order to avoid the constant threat of predation–these trilobites still contributed significantly to their kind's lingering legacy. Such trilobites as this Mississippian-age Pudoproetus fernglenensis from New Mexico, may have been a far cry from the foot-long, spinose trilobite “monsters” that inhabited the Ordovician and Silurian seas, but in look, design and lifestyle they were still very much quintessential trilobites.
More than 300 primate species—including humans, monkeys, lemurs, and apes—are alive today, and all evolved from a common ancestor over the last 60 to 80 million years. Primates are closely related and genetically similar to one another. On average, human DNA is 96% identical to the DNA of our most distant primate relatives, 97% identical to orangutans, and nearly 99% identical to that of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Believe it or not, Darwin’s kids doodled all over his “Origin of Species” manuscript, and we may have them to thank for the surviving handwritten pages!
Why is nature such a good incubator for innovation? Because every living thing on the planet has overcome an incredible number of challenges in order to survive. Inspired by Earth’s biodiversity, scientists today are developing fascinating new technologies to solve tough problems and heal human beings.
Want to discover which natural ideas are inspiring engineering problems? Take the Bioinspiration quiz!
The formation of the Andes mountain chain gave a powerful boost to South American biodiversity, and new research finds that scorpions were no exception.
A study published this week in the Journal of Biogeography suggests that the large number of scorpion species present in the genus Brachistosternus is likely due to the unique microclimates that formed as the Andes arose over the last 30 million years.
“There are more than 50 species of Brachistosternus scorpions, most of which live in or around the Andes, and this high diversity can largely be attributed to the formation of the mountains,” said author Lorenzo Prendini, a curator in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. “As the Andes uplifted, new valleys, slopes, and highlands formed, isolating ancestral populations of Brachistosternus and providing new habitats into which they were able to diversify.”
Image: © L. Prendini/R. Mercurio
Paleontologists Gain New Insight to "Telescoping" Crocodile Eyes
Fossils of a 13-million-year-old extinct crocodilian from the Peruvian Amazon suggest that South American and Indian species of crocodiles evolved separately to acquire protruding, “telescoped” eyes that helped the animals conceal themselves underwater while scanning the banks of rivers and lakes for prey. Full story.
The new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, provides a long-sought insight about the extremely long and slender-snouted gavialoids—one of the three major types of crocodilians, along with alligators and crocodiles—that are represented today by just one living species, the Indian gharial.
“The extraordinarily well-preserved fossils of this new 13-million-year-old gharial document how independent, parallel evolution of long-snouted animals with specialized visual systems occurred across continents,” said John Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals in the Museum's Division of Paleontology and an author on the paper.
Known for their elongated, narrow snouts, and sharp, piercing teeth, gavialoids are a diverse group of mostly extinct crocodilians that lived in an array of tropical regions including in South America and India. Fossils of gavialoid crocodilians from South America and the modern Indian gharial have similar telescoped eyes, but it was not known how these features evolved.
Flynn has been co-leading prospecting and collecting expeditions in Peru's Pebas Formation for more than a decade, uncovering fossils including a hyper-diverse assemblage of at least seven different species of crocodilians in the Amazon bone bed.
NEW RESEARCH suggests that humans became the large-brained, large-bodied animals we are today because of natural selection to increase brain size. The work, published in the journal Current Anthropology, contradicts previous models that treat brain size and body size as independent traits responding to separate evolutionary pressures.
Instead, the study shows for the first time that brain size and body size are genetically linked, and that selection to increase brain size will “pull along” body size, a phenomenon that may have played a key role in the increase in both traits that occurred near the origins of modern humans and other species in the genus Homo.
“Over the last four million years, brain size and body size increased substantially in our human ancestors,” said paper author Mark Grabowski, a James Arthur postdoctoral fellow in the Museum's Division of Anthropology. “This observation has led to numerous hypotheses attempting to explain why observed changes occurred, but these typically make the assumption that brain- and body-size evolution are the products of separate natural selection forces.”