Ancestors of Whale Sharks in Panama May Come From Distant Waters Around the World
The world’s largest fish, the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), is a plankton-loving giant that can be found alone or in groups in all tropical oceans….
The world’s largest fish, the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), is a plankton-loving giant that can be found alone or in groups in all tropical oceans….
Nepalese craftsman, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, holds the record as the world’s shortest adult, at 54.6 cm (1 ft 9 ½ inches). The tallest human is…
About 66 million years ago, a huge asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan, plunging the Earth into darkness. The impact transformed tropical rainforests,…
Poop is full of secrets. For scientists, digging into feces provides insights into animal diets and is particularly useful for understanding nocturnal or rare species….
On an expedition to the Central Andean Plateau, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and colleagues were astounded to find a huge fossil…
When talking to babies, humans slow down their speech, raise their pitch and change the “color” of their voice. This “baby talk,” as people know…
All living things have tipping points: points of no return, beyond which they cannot thrive. A new report in Science shows that maximum daily temperatures…
Pac-Man, the open-mouthed face of the most successful arcade game ever, is much more well-known than any of the one-celled organisms called protists, at least…
An international team of scientists working with Heliconius butterflies at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama was faced with a mystery: How do…
Pax, Latin for ‘peace’ made its way into the scientific name of a new coral discovered off Pacific Panama and described in the journal Bulletin…
In the arms race between predators and prey, each evolves more and more sophisticated ways of catching or escaping from the other. Rachel Page, staff…
A study in the journal Bulletin of Marine Science describes a new, blood-red species of octocoral found in Panama. The species in the genus Thesea…
A recent discovery shows that people living along the coast of Peru were eating corn in several fashions, including popcorn and flour corn, before ceramic…
According to Smithsonian researchers, the brains of tiny spiders are so large that they fill their body cavities and even overflow into their legs. They…