As part of it’s new exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, researchers at AMNH have found some amazing images in the archives.  These are models of a variety of anglerfish, loaned to AMNH from the British Museum back in 1933.

The full slideshow of images is here.

To see modern anglerfish models lit from within as well as a host of other creatures that glow in the dark, visit AMNH.  And to learn about the incredible Diversity of Fishes, check out our Seminars on Science course this summer!

The New York Times is reporting that feathered dinosaurs might have been more prevalent – and larger – than previously thought. A 125-million year old fossil discovered in northern China shows all the signs of feathers that paleontologists have come to accept as common in dinosaur species.  The uncommon part – the dinosaur was 30 feet long and probably weighed well over a ton.

In an article in the journal Nature, published online Wednesday, Chinese and Canadian paleontologists said the discovery provided the first “direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs” and offered “new insights into early feather evolution.”  Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, who was the lead author of the paper, said in a statement that it was “possible that feathers were much more widespread, at least among meat-eating dinosaurs, than most scientists would have guessed even a few years ago.”

Dr. Mark Norell, author of our course The Link Between Dinosaurs and Birds said this find could prove very significant because “they swept aside a longstanding argument that perhaps dinosaurs had feathers only when they were small and shed them as they grew.”  But why have feathers at all?

The researchers suggested that the climate might have been cooler when this feathered giant lived than it was when T. rex roamed in the late Cretaceous period. Not necessarily, said Dr. Norell, who pointed out that large, hairy mammals like giraffes and wildebeest, perhaps analogous to feathered dinosaurs, live today in hot latitudes.

A recently published report about Japanese honeybees may have turned up an amazing genetic mutation that allows the honeybees to withstand the high heat they create when they surround and kill Asian giant hornets:

In a battle with Asian giant hornets, Japanese honeybees turn up the heat—quite literally—by swarming around the hornets and cooking them to death.

Now scientists have found a genetic switch in the honeybees’ brains that turns on during the attacks. Though the gene activity doesn’t seem to trigger the behavior, it might provide leads in explaining the insects’ ability to withstand the heat of so called hot defensive bee balls, a new study says.

The bees’ strange defensive tactic evolved because their venomous stingers are too small to pierce the thick exoskeletons of the giant hornets—insects which can grow about two inches (five centimeters) long. The quivering of muscle fibers from so many bees creates real heat that kills off the predators. (National Geographic Online)

For more on how genes influence biology, check out the Seminars on Science course Genetics, Genomics, Genethics.

In a surprising and exciting twist, a new species of frog has been identified in the most unlikely of places – the heart of New York City!

The mottled green creature was for years mistaken as belonging to a widespread variety of the leopard frog. But now scientists realize this is new. “For a new species to go unrecognized in this area is amazing,” UCLA biologist Brad Shaffer said Wednesday. New York is surrounded by wetlands and other nature-filled areas. But this latest urban creature appears to have chosen one of the grittiest corners as the center of its habitat: Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

In the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Shaffer and other scientists compared the frog’s DNA to that of other leopard frog species in the region. That’s when they understood they were looking at a leopard frog, but a different kind. “Many amphibians are secretive and very hard to find, but these frogs are pretty obvious animals,” said Shaffer. “This shows that even in the largest city in the US, there are still new and important species waiting to be discovered.” (from the AFP)

For those of us science fans who live and work in urban centers, this is exciting news; new discoveries can happen in our own backyards, even when they’re mostly concrete!

The American Museum of Natural History (and some of us Seminars on Science staff!) will be at the National Science Teacher’s Association Conference in Indianapolis this Thursday – Sunday.  There are plenty of panels where AMNH Educators will give you resources and information about using data sets in the classroom, strengthening inquiry-based learning, forming close relationships with informal science institutions in your area and more!

For a full schedule of AMNH panels, type “American Museum of Natural History” into the NSTA Conference website keyword search.  Or drop by Booth 1256 in the exhibition hall for a schedule and tons of free resources!

As part of the upcoming AMNH exhibit “Spiders Alive!”, visitors will have a chance to get up-close and personal with some Chilean rose tarantulas. Hazel Davies, the AMNH director of living exhibits, talked to the New York Times about getting the spiders acclimated to being touched and held daily:

“Spiders feel their world around them from vibrations and from movements,” [said Ms. Davies]. Although Chilean rose hairs are among the most easygoing and benign of tarantulas — they rarely bite and their venom is not particularly dangerous — unfamiliar vibrations can make them skittish. So Ms. Davies and her assistants will start by removing the lids from the spiders’ terrariums and talking over them, so they feel the vibrations of speech. If they can deal with that, some light touching will follow. “We’ll work through stages of being able to just pick them up,” she said.

…

Many spiders are so small they would be difficult for visitors to see. Most are nocturnal and do not move much during the day. So the exhibit will rely on videos of some species that are not practical to exhibit.

Live specimens will be behind glass, Ms. Davies said. “It’s a case of thinking about the display habitats that we’re going to set up for them and how that’s going to work so that it will be comfortable for the spider but so that people can also engage with them and actually see something,” she said. Two trapdoor spiders, for example, burrow into soil. For visitors to be able to see the burrows the display has to be designed something like an ant farm, so that the spiders will burrow against the glass.

“Spiders Alive!” will open at the Museum in July, and be a bi-annual exhibition.

To learn more about spiders, check out the Seminars on Science course In the Field with Spiders.

Climate Central, a non-profit organization that brings together climate science research from around the globe, recently posted a series of eye-opening interactive maps called “Surging Seas“.  These interactive maps allow users to see how rising sea levels might effect major coastal areas from Boston to Miami to LA:

The report is the first to analyze how sea level rise caused by global warming is compounding the risk from storm surges throughout the coastal contiguous U.S. It is also first to generate local and national estimates of the land, housing and population in vulnerable low-lying areas, and associate this information with flood risk timelines. The Surging Seas website includes a searchable, interactive online map that zooms down to neighborhood level, and shows risk zones and statistics for 3,000 coastal towns, cities, counties and states affected up to 10 feet above the high tide line.

Check out all the interactive maps of the “Surging Seas” project!

Proving that AMNH scientists are always on the cutting edge of research, Dr. Mark Norell announced that he, along with Americana and Chinese colleagues, have found evidence that a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur known as Microraptor had black iridescent feathers when it roamed the Earth 130 million years ago. The findings, which suggest the importance of display in the early evolution of feathers, are published in the March 9 edition of the journal Science.

“This study gives us an unprecedented glimpse at what this animal looked like when it was alive,” said Dr. Norell, one of the paper’s authors and chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology.

The research also shows that Microraptor’s tail fan, which was once thought to be a broad, teardrop-shaped surface meant to help with flight, is actually much narrower with two elongate feathers. Both of these findings suggest that, like many modern birds, Microraptor most likely used its ornate feathers for courtship and other social interactions, not for aerodynamics.

Dr. Norell is the author of the Seminars on Science course The Link Between Dinosaurs and Birds.

Many teachers already know about the new wave of crowd-sourced funding that supports the efforts of budding scholars through sites like DonorsChoose.org and Kickstarter.com.

Kickstarter has supported science and technology projects from the start, like John Halter’s Bacillus video game that is “meant to highlight the diversity, variety, and uniqueness of the Prokaryotes (Bacteria and Archaea)” in a fun, interactive way.  At DonorsChoose, teachers ask for help paying for small-scale classroom projects or equipment upgrades.  Over 5,000 science and math projects are currently looking for funding on the site, with more added every day.

Now those of us who love science have another way to fund science – this time in the area of research.  PetriDish.org is a site that “lets you fund promising research projects and join first hand in new discoveries.” Not only that, but funders of projects that get off the ground can recieve early updates about how the research is going.  This kind of ‘citizen science’ model is just what the founders intended:

The emotion that we’re trying to get across is that people are so excited about new discoveries, new ideas, and science, but a person at home has no way to feel like they’re a part of that, except for reading along. We wanted to build a site where people could be part of the story, where you can make a new discovery happen—you can point to something and say, “You know what, if it wasn’t for me, this discovery would not have happened yet, this new species of ant would not have been discovered, this moon outside of the solar system would never have been found. I contributed to understanding the dynamic that goes into monkey communication.” There are a lot of cool things that you can make happen.  (Discoverymagazine.com)

All of these sites offer scientists and educators plenty of opportunities to support science research and outreach – check them out today and become part of science in action!

According to new research published in the journal Science, the thing that could most separate us from our primate cousins is a trait that every human child is forced to learn on the playground: sharing.  Researchers say it’s not how smart we are that helps us form complex societies. Instead, it’s how willing and able we are share not just food and objects, but ideas.

Time.com puts it this way:

But intelligence is only part of our collective success. You may be the smartest member of your early-human tribe, but if you die without ever telling other early humans all the cool and innovative things you know, those accomplishments die with you. The real key to the steady climb of humanity — what anthropologists call the “racheting” of the culture — is sharing, the democratic distribution of information so that what starts off as personal knowledge eventually becomes community knowledge. Once an idea goes viral that way, everyone can take a crack at improving on it further.

For more on what makes us human, check out AMNH’s Hall of Human Origins.