“Unnatural” Selection
Humans driveevolutionof conch size
March 21, 2014
Thousands of years of hunting has turned a substantial meal into a bite-sized snack.
Thousands of years of hunting has turned a substantial meal into a bite-sized snack.
As bacterial infections become more resistant to antibiotics, the toxins on the skin of frogs presents huge opportunity for new drug discovery.
To save frogs from an extinction-causing fungus, Smithsonian scientists needed to innovate captive feeding and breeding techniques.
As part of the Smithsonian’s program to save frogs from an extinction-causing disease, the Punta Culebra Nature Center offers an exclusive glimpse at some of the amphibians we and our partner institutions are trying to save.
20-million-year-old fossil seeds shed light on origins of plant biodiversity in Panama.
Fossil reefs from around the Caribbean show how biologically rich these ecosystems once were — and provide goalposts for conservationists hoping to restore them.
About 66 million years ago, a radical change on the Earth filled tropical forests with flowers. A new catalog of fossil pollen grains may hold an explanation.
Smithsonian scientists who documented massive mortality of corals and reef organisms meticulously studied one of the apparent causes: oxygen deficiency. A Smithsonian paleobiologist asks if the recent fossil record shows signs of similar hypoxia events.
Perhaps old species, like some older people, gradually lose their ability to deal with changes in their environment. Aaron O’Dea and colleagues show that when the Caribbean was cut off from the Pacific by the rise of the Panama land bridge, evolutionarily old species took longer to expand into new habitats than evolutionarily younger species did.
How do animals adapt to urban environments? In the case of the Tungara frog, city males put on a more elaborate display than males in forested areas.