Stamp collection. A well-known collection of rare stamps held for decades by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia was recently transferred to the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. Known as the Harry L. Jefferys collection, it consists of U.S. stamps, covers, proofs and essays and is particularly strong in stamps issued from 1851 to 1857. The collection includes full panes of the U.S. one-cent and three-cent 1851 issue; the U.S. 12-cent 1857 issue; scarce positions of the U.S. one-cent 1851 issue and several printing errors, including plate position number 2 of the 1918 inverted Jenny airmail stamp.

Bats and insects. Using nets to cover common species of tropical plants only by day and only by night, scientists at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama recently demonstrated that bats are more effective than birds in reducing the numbers of plant-eating insects, such as caterpillars, katydids and beetles. Uncovered plants that commonly lose 4.3 percent of their leaf area to insect herbivores lost a striking 13.3 percent of their leaf area when bats were prevented, with nighttime nets, from feeding on or near the plants. When birds were prevented from feeding near the plants in the daytime, the plants lost 7.2 percent of their leaf area to insects. The scientists concluded that bats consume roughly twice as many plant-eating insects in the tropical forest understory than do birds.

Patent medicines. A collection of more than 375 patent medicines spanning 150 years and containing products used in the western United States and Canada was recently donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History by Richard Pollay, professor emeritus of commerce for the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. Also included in the Pollay donation are toiletry items, 75 almanacs and eight advertising signs. These new items augment the more than 4,000 nonprescription name-brand medicines dating from the 19th century to the present that are already in the collections of the American History Museum’s Division of Medicine and Science.

Jack Mitchell donation. Renowned arts photographer Jack Mitchell recently donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art a group of his vintage photographs, including 54 large-format photographs of painters and sculptors taken in New York City between 1966 and 1977. Mitchell’s gift includes stunning portraits of the artists Red Grooms, Duane Hanson, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol and others. Mitchell’s photographs of visual artists, film and theater personalities, musicians and writers have graced the covers and pages of many publications, including The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Newsweek, People Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, Vanity Fair and Vogue.

Fossil forest. A team of scientists that included Bill DiMichele, paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, recently discovered the remains of a 300 million-year-old tropical rain forest in eastern Illinois that is preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine some 250 feet below the surface. This fossilized forest extends for more than four square miles as the roof of two adjacent coal mines and consists of lycopsid tree and tree fern fossils, as well as horsetails, seed ferns and cordaitales. The forest was preserved when an earthquake dropped it below sea level and flooding buried it in sediment. Mud and silt preserved the stumps and logs in a layer that eventually turned into shale.