Museums’ collections are a priceless resource for scientists, but they’re not easy to access. Digitizing specimens – like the 700 bat skulls the author studied – is a way to let everyone in.
Lionesses with cubs in Etosha National Park.
Niki Rust
A tiny percentage of museums’ natural history holdings are on display. Very little of these vast archives is digitized and available online. But museums are working to change that.
Brazil’s gutted National Museum now resembles an archaeological ruin itself.
AP Photo/Mario Lobao
It’s a comforting falsehood that once an artifact joins a museum’s collection, it’s safe for eternity. Museums face many foes in the fight to preserve – a lack of funds might be the biggest.
Down House: the home (and garden) of Charles Darwin.
Shutterstock
Was Darwin inspired by the tropical wildlife of his travels to discover natural selection? Actually, pigeons, worms and barnacles were far more prominent in his thinking.
Strange frond-like sea creatures are among the planet’s earliest animals, but new research dates them and the entire animal kingdom to much earlier than first thought.
America’s dogs are a husk(y) of what they once were.
Christine Zenino/Wikimedia Commons
Are DNA samples today’s version of the human skeletons that hung in 20th-century natural history museums? They can provide genetic revelations about our species’ history – but at an ethical price.
TV audiences cheered on the iguanas’ escape, but won’t somebody think of the poor snakes?
This clay facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, carefully sculpted around the morphological features of his skull, suggests how he may have looked alive nearly 9,000 years ago.
Brittney Tatchell, Smithsonian Institution
A 9,000-year-old skeleton became a high-profile and highly contested case for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. How do we respectfully deal with ancient human remains?
A morbid curiosity makes it hard not to be fascinated.
Yelp Inc.
You don’t have to be a physician or anatomist to be curious about how bodies work. Exhibits of dead human specimens have been around for quite a while – capitalizing on our fascination with death.
New forms of life are discovered in high-tech ways that leave yesterday’s natural history collections in the dust.
Detective image via www.shutterstock.com.
Viewing human migration through the lens of natural history makes one thing clear: society needs to prepare for more migrations of people and the species we depend on.
What do collections of dead butterflies do for their still-living counterparts?
Andrew D Warren
The dead animal specimens that comprise natural history collections contribute a lot toward scientific understanding of their still-living counterparts – and those that have gone extinct.
Behold the biggest animal to have ever lived.
Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum in London is replacing its skeleton of the long-necked dinosaur Diplodocus – an iconic denizen of the main entrance hall for nearly four decades – with a blue whale skeleton…