National Museum of Natural History

Dinosaurs are big business now, whether as $10 plastic T. rex toys or $45 million "alternative assets"

By raising her son to be curious about the natural world, Kirk Johnson's mother helped shape the trajectory of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Why did humans start speaking

Scientists have tagged a giant male great white shark off the East Coast. The researchers said "Contender" is the largest male white shark ever caught and studied in the northwest Atlantic.

An uptick in seismic activity on the volcanic island of Santorini has raised concerns about a potential eruption.

NASA's findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.

Scientists have uncovered the oldest-known fossil of a tadpole that wriggled around 160...

Among other things, the study demonstrates how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere influences temperatures

Researchers have recently released a study in Ecology and Evolution outlining their in-depth analysis of historic baleen plates, the comb structures that are used by some species of whales to filter food, from Southern Hemisphere blue and fin whales. The research was conducted using samples collected in the late 1940s that were recently rediscovered in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Cut marks found on giant armadillo fossils suggest the presence of early humans in what's now Argentina more than 20,000 years ago — far earlier than once...

Only a few U.S. museums still employ the specialists. The rest rely on a small group of highly skilled contractors

A trillion cicadas are about to emerge. They're a little early thanks to climate change.

When Antarctica was lush with forests during the Eocene, there was a carnivorous bird that had a curved beak and terrifying claws.

Bizarre worm that looks "like the rump of a pig from one side and Mick Jagger's lips from the other" may be in the middle of an evolutionary leap, scientists say.

Two sizable adjacent broods of periodical cicadas - the kind that spend a specific number of years underground as nymphs before popping up together for a...

Ancient stone tools found in western Ukraine may be the oldest known evidence of early human presence in Europe

A new study argues that Perucetus, an ancient whale species, was certainly big, but not as big as today's blue whales.

Remotely operated vehicle on a research dive captures close-up video of a beady-eyed gulper eel with a parasitic copepod permanently attached to its body.

Akito Kawahara has spent his life devoted to lepidoptera. Now he's correcting the record on where they first evolved

"Like moths to a flame" is a saying that alludes to insects' apparent attraction to artificial light. A new study has found a potential explanation for the...