Life
Some of these Smithsonian secrets might just blow your mind
Millions of treasures stashed in this museum storage site — open only to select visitors — tell the history of Earth's inhabitants.
By Meghan Rosen
Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
More Stories in Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
- Animals
Let’s learn about the platypus
Every new discovery about platypuses reveals them to be even odder than we thought.
- Fossils
Fossil vomit shows what one 290-million-year-old predator dined on
Bones in the barfed-up material, which dates to a time before the dinosaurs, offer a rare peek into the diet of a prehistoric hunter.
- Animals
Analyze This: Primates may have evolved in the cold
Scientists thought the ancestor of humans and apes lived in the tropics. A new study points to a chilly location instead for primate evolution.
- Animals
Mummies suggest a way to help reintroduce cheetahs to Arabia
DNA from Arabian cheetah remains reveals that these now-extinct populations might be replaced by rewilding close cheetah relatives from northwest Africa.
- Fossils
Prehistoric ‘sea’ monster also lurked in rivers, data show
A 66-million-year-old fossil tooth turned up alongside remains of a T. rex and ancient crocodile. This shows some mosasaurs roamed into rivers.
- Archaeology
Neandertals used fire-making tools 400,000 years ago
Flint, iron pyrite and fire residues found at an ancient site in England offer the earliest clear evidence of people lighting fires.
- Fossils
Let’s learn about Tyrannosaurus rex
These fearsome predators truly were enormous — with the bone-crushing bite power to match.
- Animals
RNA from mummified woolly mammoth is the oldest ever recovered
Genetic details from the animal, named Yuka, give a snapshot into its last moments alive. The mammoth had been preserved in permafrost for 40,000 years.
- Environment
Nuclear weapons tests many decades ago have left a radioactive legacy
Decades of aboveground nuclear weapons tests, starting in the 1950s, lightly littered the planet with toxic fallout, which appears to have sickened some people.
