Two levels underground, Chicago's Field Museum has a secret bunker. The sub-basement Collections Resource Center houses millions of biological specimens for scientists around the world to use in their research, including ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 30, 2022
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70
Ask any scientist—for every "Eureka!" moment, there's a lot of less-than-glamorous work behind the scenes. Making discoveries about everything from a new species of dinosaur to insights about climate change entails some ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 27, 2022
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5
For decades, paleontologists have debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded could give us hints ...
Paleontology & Fossils
May 25, 2022
1
1277
Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons— they can honor an important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where it's from. For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000, the scientific ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 15, 2022
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139
Spring is in the air. Birds are singing and beginning to build their nests. It happens every year, like clockwork. But a new study in the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that many species of birds are nesting and laying eggs ...
Ecology
Mar 25, 2022
47
241
Spinosaurus is the biggest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered—even bigger than T. rex—but the way it hunted has been a subject of debate for decades. It's hard to guess the behavior of an animal that we only know from ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Mar 23, 2022
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450
Location, location, location—it's the first rule of real estate. For a long time, it's been widely assumed that being close to resources drives settlement patterns, with cities generally founded near water and fertile land ...
Archaeology
Mar 8, 2022
11
215
Approximately 80 miles from the westernmost reach of China's Great Wall, paleontologists found relics of an even more ancient world. Over the last two decades, teams of researchers unearthed more than 100 specimens of fossil ...
Evolution
Feb 18, 2022
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843
Algae are more than just the green scum that shows up on aquarium walls. The tiny plants, when teamed up with a fungus, can form a composite structure called lichen. Lichens grow everywhere, from tundras in the Arctic to ...
Ecology
Feb 15, 2022
1
109
Lots of bats echolocate—they emit high-pitched squeaks, and based on how those sound waves bounce off their surroundings, they're able to navigate in the dark and find insects to eat. But a lot about how bats evolved these ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 26, 2022
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776
