In the latest episode of the web series Shelf Life, we learned about the surprising symbiotic relationship between spotted salamanders and algae.

New work on a 90-million-year old reptile fossil is helping scientists determine how snakes lost their limbs. The research, conducted by Mark Norell, the Macaulay Curator and chair in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology, and Hongyu Yi, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, indicates that snakes…

Just like any form of life, microbes need energy. To get it, they consume molecules they come into contact with for sustenance. No metabolism is perfect, though, and even the smallest meals produce waste products, a process known as fermentation. A microbe’s trash can be a treasure to us, though—these waste molecules…

All animals move at some point in their lives. And for most organisms—other than plants—this task takes more energy than anything else they do. Creatures that waste energy are very likely doomed, so it’s no surprise that evolution has produced some amazing ways of getting around efficiently—sometimes from one side of…

Feast your eyes on the first photographs ever taken of the male moustached kingfisher, a “ghost species” that has eluded scientists since the 1920’s.

In the latest episode of Shelf Life, we introduced you to Alfred Kinsey’s amazing collection of gall wasp specimens, which are housed at the Museum. Gall wasps make their first homes in their namesake “galls,” growths on trees and other plants where mother gall wasps lay their eggs and new gall wasps gestate.

On a day designated for celebrating canine companions, go behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History into the fossil dog collection—the largest of its kind in the world. Find dire wolves, bear-sized dogs, and more. These images and captions come to us from Jack Tseng, a National Science Foundation…

New research heavily based on the Museum’s fossil dog collection—the largest of its kind in the world—shows how dogs evolved in response to a cooling, drying climate in North America over the last 40 million years.

An international research team has discovered a Jupiter-like planet 100 light-years away that could help astronomers understand how planets formed in our solar system. Called 51 Eridani b, it is the first planet detected by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument that started running last year on the Gemini…

Birds of a feather may flock together, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily share close genetic ties. Taxonomists first classified birds into groups primarily based on appearance, relying heavily on the coloration of feathers to determine relationships among species. But research led by Museum Curatorial Associate…

Heading to the beach this month? So are some of the American Museum of Natural History’s graduate students, who are studying for their Ph.D.s in comparative biology at the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School. As they get ready to head out on their vacations, three students recently shared their favorite science…

New research shows that the fearsome teeth of the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis grew at a rate about double that of their living relatives, but still took years to fully emerge. The findings, published today in the journal PLOS ONE and based on a new technique that combines isotopic analysis and x-ray imaging,…

Researchers from the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Namibia, and Texas A&M University have created a visual atlas and dictionary of terms for the many strange features that adorn the fearsome-looking jaws of a little known group of arachnids. Called camel spiders, baardskeerders…

The latest episode of Shelf Life traces the travels of the Museum’s specimen of one of the most iconic animals in the world’s oceans, the giant squid. But incredible as these huge creatures are, they’re just one of an amazing class of invertebrates known as cephalopods. The Museum is teaming with Science Friday for …

In spring or summer, you can look down almost any street and see flowers blooming, on plants from dandelions to cherry trees. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, are some of the most successful and diverse forms of life on Earth. Researchers have long attributed that success, in part, to the alliances these plants have…

New work that more precisely dates the skeletal remains of scarlet macaws found in an ancient Pueblo settlement suggests that complex social and political structures may have emerged in the American Southwest at least 150 years earlier than previously thought.

For decades, paleontologist Malcolm McKenna was a fixture at the American Museum of Natural History, where he served as the Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals. A giant in his field, Dr. McKenna, who passed away in 2008, penned hundreds of scientific papers and the book Classification of Mammals Above the Species Level,…

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers were trawling in the Gulf of Mexico for a sperm whale feeding study in 2010 when they inadvertently pulled up a tiny, odd-looking shark with a bulbous head and rows of sharp teeth. NOAA researchers subsequently identified the creature as the rare…

What does it take to solve a mystery about an ancient Native American language group? 16th-century missionary texts, DNA sequencing methods, and lots of algorithms.