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.

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…

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…

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.

Natural selection is a mechanism by which populations adapt and evolve. In its essence, it is a simple statement about rates of reproduction and mortality: Those individual organisms who happen to be best suited to an environment survive and reproduce most successfully, producing many similarly well-adapted…

In 1929 a large earthquake occurred near New Zealand. Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann “the only Danish seismologist,” as she once referred to herself—studied the shock waves and was puzzled by what she saw. A few P-waves, which should have been deflected by the core, were in fact recorded at seismic stations.

Before the days of Bill Gates and OS updates, the word "computer" was used (as far back as the 17th century) to describe a person who performs calculations. The latest episode of Shelf Life includes a segment about Henrietta Leavitt—an astronomer and human "computer" whose discoveries allowed researchers to determine…

March is Women's History Month and we're profiling some of the remarkable women who work at the Museum.

Analysis of fossil collagen shows that unusual South American ungulates (like Toxodon platensis, seen here) were more closely related to horses and their allies than to other living placental mammals. Illustration © Peter Schouten

After witnessing the master of a Korean household receive a tongue-lashing from a female shaman, anthropologist Laurel Kendall realized that "in this corner of Korean society, my gender is going to be an advantage." Dr. Kendall is one of the remarkable women at the Museum we are profiling this March as part of…

According to microbiologist Susan Perkins, hers is the dream job of a 6-year-old. "A lot of what I get to do is travel to fun and interesting places and chase and catch lizards," says Perkins, whose work focuses on malarial parasites. She is also an associate curator in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology,…

March is Women's History Month, and the Museum is looking to the it's nearly 150-year past, exciting present, and bright future to bring you stories of women in science here at the American Museum of Natural History.

The answer might surprise you.

Thirteen million years ago, as many as seven different species of crocodiles hunted in the swampy waters of what is now northeastern Peru, new research shows. This hyperdiverse assemblage, revealed through more than a decade of work in Amazon bone beds, contains the largest number of crocodile species co-existing in…

We may have Charles Darwin's children to thank for the surviving handwritten pages of the naturalist's "On the Origin of Species" manuscript. Most of the original 600 pages are lost, and of the 45 pages that exist today, many were repurposed by Darwin's brood of 10 children as art supplies.

New findings published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of researchers, including Museum Curator Ross MacPhee, are revising estimates of the age of American mastodon fossils—and helping to resolve a quandary about how these extinct relatives of elephants once…

Dive deep inside the Museum's collection to discover the past, present, and future of its approximately 33 million artifacts and specimens in this new series with original monthly videos. Shelf Life is a collection for curious minds—opening doors, pulling out drawers, and taking the lids off some of the…

On October 27, the third cohort of graduates from the Museum's Richard Gilder Graduate School—the first Ph.D.-granting program for any museum in the Western Hemisphere—will receive Doctor of Philosophy degrees in comparative biology at a commencement ceremony in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. We're profiling the…