Research Highlights
Natural History Highlight features interesting and exciting activities and objects from the Museum. We will frequently introduce new highlights that come from our research, collections, exhibits, and projects.
Current Highlights
Jellyfish Romance
For most jellyfish, reproduction is not a particularly romantic affair. But recent research explores at least one species, called Carybdea sivickisi by scientists, shows a more intimate courtship routine.(August 2008)
UV Rays Shed New Light on the Hope Diamond’s Mysterious Red Glow
What causes the 45.52-carat blue diamond to give off a fiery red glow for several minutes after being exposed to ultra-violet light? Scientists have finally researched this phenomenon known as phosphorescence. (August 2008)
The Truth About Crystal Skulls
Handmade by ancient Aztecs? The work of supernatural powers? Or carefully crafted fakes? After decades of mystery, the real nature of crystal skulls is finally clear, thanks to scientists using modern technology to determine how they were made. (July 2008)
Past Highlights
CSI for Birds: Scientists Use Forensic Techniques to Improve Airport Safety
Researchers use the museum’s bird collections to identify birds that are involved in birdstrikes using both traditional morphological identifications and molecular techniques. (October 2007)
Four Square Miles of Carboniferous Forest Discovered
Smithsonian paleontologist Bill DiMichele and colleagues Howard Falcon-Lang (University of Bristol), John Nelson and Scott Elrick (Illinois State Geological Survey), and Phil Ames (Peabody Coal Company) discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface. Their discovery was recently published in the journal "Geology" entitled “Ecological Gradients Within a Pennsylvanian Mire Forest.”
Naked Corals: Did They Lose Their Skeletons?
Corals structure the most diverse ecosystems in the oceans, the tropical reef environments, and are essential to all marine life. Scientists including Allen Collins at the National Museum of Natural History are working to understand coral biology and evolution. All corals in the sea have hard external skeletons, but their close relatives, the anemones, do not. How are these groups related and can their relationships shed light on the future of the thousands of stony coral species today facing pressures of increasing CO2 in the ocean brought about by human activity.
Tales of Extinction and Recovery
The greatest mass extinction of the last 600 million years of Earth history occurred 251 million years ago. How can scientists be sure of their evidence for this mass extinction and how can they best understand how terrestrial ecosystems recovered from it? Research in South Africa’s Karoo Basin by NMNH scientist Conrad Labandeira is illuminating answers to these questions. (August 2006)
Phytoliths: An Archaeobotanist's Best Friend
How can scientists tell us what prehistoric peoples ate? How do we know when humans began to cultivate the grains they ate rather than simply gathering wild foods? Could the plants themselves leave us any tell-tale signs? Smithsonian scientist, Dolores Piperno, has discovered new ways to answer these tantalizing questions. (June 2006)
Mississippi to Montana: Plants Danced to Climate’s Quick Tune
At the February 2006 AAAS meeting, Smithsonian Paleobiologist Scott Wing updated results of his November 11 cover story in Science. A team led by Wing found that a period of rapid global warming 55 million years ago caused major changes in where plants grew. (March 2006)
Escape from Parasites: Tracking the Distribution of Infectious Disease
A recent NMNH/NZP study makes clear that bird introductions have the ability to move parasites around the World, an important finding in this time of emerging infectious diseases. (January 2006)
Giant Fossil Scale Tree
In June, 2005, the National Museum of Natural History received one of the largest plant fossils ever collected - 3.9 m (13 ft) long and 3.7 m (12 ft) high, and weighing more than 16 tons. New images added to the gallery October 2006. Come take a look...
(Nov. 2005)
The Return of the Titan
A gigantic plant, Amorphophallus titanum (commonly known as 'titan arum'), is about to flower! The plant is part of the living research collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany, and is currently on display in the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) Conservatory. (Nov. 2005)
The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) Lab
For more than 30 years the SEM Lab has assisted researchers at the museum to explore and understand our world at the microscopic level. Take a microscopic tour of NMNH research as seen in the SEM Lab. (Feb. 2005)
Treetop Opera - Cicadas!
Billions upon billions of periodical cicadas made an historical appearance last Spring. (May 2004)
The Coelacanth: More Living than Fossil
The coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to exist only as a fossil, was discovered in 1938 living in South African waters. Since 1938, other discoveries of this "living fossil" have been made not only in the Comoros and along the eastern coast of Africa, but in Indonesian waters as well. (May 2003)
Complex Magmatic Processes Operating in Deep Volcanic Plumbing Systems
Analysis of decades-old volcanic cinder samples provides a glimpse into the complex interplay among the volcanic processes of degassing, crystallization, and crustal assimilation during the rise of magma (molten rock) through Earth’s crust just prior to eruption. (April 2002)
Discovery of a New Plant Genus
NMNH Botanist W. John Kress and his colleague Kai Larsen, University of Aarhus, Denmark, have named a new genus of ginger. Discovery of a new plant genus is unusual, unlike the more frequent naming of a new species. The new genus Smithatris, in the plant family Zingiberaceae, joins 50 other genera and over 1,200 species.
Parataxonomy Building Expertise at Research Locations: Relying upon Parataxonomists
Biologists recognize the tremendous diversity in the earth’s tropical rainforests, and many pursue research projects in them. Despite the great interest in studying the rainforests, there aren’t enough highly trained taxonomists who are resident in those locations, which means that the existing capacity to collect and analyze specimens is not great enough to support the high amount of research to be done. A strategy has emerged for developing on-site expertise, a form of "capacity building", while pursuing research - and NMNH entomologists and their colleagues provide examples of this growing trend. In pursuing the goal of understanding the earth’s biodiversity, scientists increasingly are training and relying upon parataxonomists when collecting and identifying insects, plants and animals.
Profiling the NMNH Collections from the Process to the Results
Caring for the NMNH’s 124 million biological, geological and anthropological objects and specimens is a monumental task. Thorough, accurate and complete information about the collections’ preservation status is critical to planning for and ensuring the appropriate care of each different type of collection, be they invertebrates preserved in fluid-filled jars, dried mammal skins, pressed plants, a Triceratops leg bone, historic photographs of Native Americans, or African musical instruments made from wood, plant fibers and hide. (January 2001)
Ancient Insect-Plant Relationship Persists through Time
How far back in time can we trace plant-animal interactions? NMNH scientist Conrad Labandeira and his colleagues have identified specific plant-animal interactions stretching back in time 66 million years ago, to the late Cretaceous period. (Dec. 2000)
Building a Dinosaur
With the arrival of a prototype reproduction Triceratops skull in August, NMNH is nearing completion of a major project - the world's first anatomically accurate Digital Dinosaur, rendered from real fossils. The Museum's Triceratops has been the subject of intensive conservation, measurement, scientific discussion and interpretation, computer analysis, and animation. Now, scientists can exhibit a newly-mounted Triceratops that is anatomically correct and, for the first time, model its movements to better understand the behavior of this three-horned, plant-eating animal from the Cretaceous Period, more than 65 million years ago. (Oct. 2000)
Old Goats in Transition
Along the craggy limestone ridges of the Zagros Mountains that run through western Iran and northeastern Iraq, the relationship between humans and goats dramatically changed around 10,000 years ago. New research by Dr. Melinda Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology & Zooarchaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Brian Hesse of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shows that goats, hunted in the region since the time of Neanderthals, were now being bred and herded instead. Their findings on this historic shift, which forever changed both the societies of human herders and the ecology of regions where goats and other livestock animals lived, were reported in the March 24, 2000 issue of Science. (Sep. 2000)
Asteroid Naming Honors Stellar Scientist
NMNH Mineral Sciences Curator Dr. Timothy J. McCoy recently had an asteroid named for him in recognition of his research in meteoritics, the study of meteorites. The asteroid is now known as Asteroid 4259 McCoy. It was discovered by Dr. Bobby Bus at Cerro Tololo, Chile, in 1988. (June/July 2000)
Giant Squid Resurfaces
The giant squid exhibit has reopened to the public after several months in storage, as major building renovations make way for a new permanent exhibit on mammals. The exhibit has been relocated to the second floor, near the hall of South American Cultures. (June 2000)
Ancient axes - Asian puzzle
For more than 50 years prehistorians have been perplexed by what seemed to be a puzzle piece missing from the archaeological record of East Asia, stone tools. (May 2000)
Is Spring “Springing” Earlier?
Find out what a 30-year study of Washington-area plants reveals. (April/May 2000)
Kennewick Man
Who were the first people to visit the American continents? Where and when did they arrive? How and why they might have come? (Feb. 2000)
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