Excavations at Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca have recovered the region’s earliest known temple precinct, which, according to a new study by the American Museum of Natural History, existed about 1,500 years earlier than similar temples described by colonial Europeans. The findings are described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1908, as an eager young assistant at the Museum, Roy Chapman Andrews got an opportunity that would transform his career as a field naturalist: a chance to travel the world studying whales. 

The popular website PhD Comics has animated the thesis of Z. Jack Tseng, Ph.D., a Frick Postdoctoral Fellow in the Museum's Division of Paleontology. His thesis explores the evolution and bite of some "of the most awesome animals on Earth: hyenas." Watch the video.

Rising temperatures will lead to a massive “greening” of the Arctic by mid-century as a result of striking increases in plant cover, according to new research led by the American Museum of Natural History. 

Like the 18th-century German naturalist August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, whose beautifully illustrated Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium (Natural history of the native frogs) he describes in an essay in Natural Histories, Curator Darrel R. Frost has created a comprehensive reference about amphibians. He manages Amphibian Species of the World, an online database and classification system for about 7,000 amphibian species, of which about 6,200 are frogs.