Island ecosystems feature unique species assemblages with diverse evolutionary histories, but identifying island communities in deep time comes with its own challenges. This Perspective explores the a...

Polymath ecologist whose research and textbooks integrating ecology and evolution have inspired generations of students.

Global warming is often predicted to drive universal declines in animal body size, but empirical evidence remains equivocal. This is particularly t...

Chemicals in the fossils of the hyena’s prey help palaeontologists reconstruct the mosaic landscape it inhabited.

American bison (Bison bison) were nearly hunted to extinction by the 20th century. This rapid decline and the fragmented nature of remnant populations pose challenges to their recovery and resilience,...

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

Increasing until extinction: understanding Macraucheniidae body-mass evolutionary history

npj Biodiversity - Middle Holocene survival of marsupial megafauna on the north coast of New Guinea

YouTube video by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM)

The three earliest continent-wide cultures in the Americas focused on the largest prey, like mammoths and giant ground sloths.

The pangolin is a midsize mammal found only in Africa and Asia. The pangolins' scales make them unique, but these scales have become their undoing. Pangolins are poached for their scales, making them ...

The evaluation of the endocranial anatomy of 43 crocodylian species reveals several differences, including variation in the curvature of the encephalic endocast, the size of the endosseous labyrinth ...

In a country ravaged by war, Ukraine’s conservators are torn between protecting the country’s past and fighting for its future.

Angiosperm reproductive evolution is traditionally linked to the end-Cretaceous biotic crisis and subsequent ecological restructuring. Here, we report diverse and unexpectedly large diaspores (dispers...

Reptiles are currently represented by turtles, archosaurs (crocodylians and birds), and lepidosaurs (lizards, snakes and the tuatara). However, these groups represent only a fraction of the known d...

ABSTRACT. C.H. Waddington (1905-1975) was a British biologist and perhaps the major figure in developmental biology between the 1940s and 1960s. He is one of the few pre-molecular-age developmental bi...

New research led by one of our postdoctoral fellows, Dr. Kaleigh Davis, takes a step toward a more predictive understanding of network interactions in the face of climate warming by combining Modern C...

Modern amphibians are characterized by an aquatic larval stage that ends abruptly with a period of widespread tissue remodeling (metamorphosis) upon transition to terrestrial adulthood. A transient la...

"Museum collections provide the record of past research, and the baseline for future research."

The Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida (UF) seeks qualified applicants for a 12-month tenure-track Assistant Curator of Ichthyology. This position will be filled at the Ass...

The treasure trove of fossils and bones has already revealed a new species of extinct whale.

Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,…

Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insi...

Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel shows us natural history museum buildings which make deep time visible in stone and space.

What does giraffe skull shape tell us about their development and evolution?

Commercial harvesting of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), primarily by British and American whalers during the late-1700s to early-1900s, nearl...

D. H. Janzen, Chihuahuan Desert Nopaleras: Defaunated Big Mammal Vegetation, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 17 (1986), pp. 595-636

The authors report Kalakocetus aurorae, a new fossil species from India, which is phylogenetically recovered as the most basal member of Cetacea and which bridges a dental morphological gap between ce...