What does it mean to be a 21st-century American naturalist? On Tuesday, April 9, join moderator Tom Brokaw and panelists Douglas Brinkley, a Roosevelt biographer; Lisa Graumlich, scientist and dean at the University of Washington's College of the Environment; Michael Novacek, senior vice president and provost of science at the Museum; and Rick Ridgeway, vice president for environmental initiatives at Patagonia, for Conservation, Wilderness, and the American Dream, a special event about the close links between American identity and natural heritage, as well as the role today's naturalists can play in conservation.

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. 

It's down to just a final, furry 4 potential nicknames for our hypothetical placental ancestor! Vote for the two finalists now.

Opening tomorrow, the special exhibition Whales: Giants of the Deep is co-curated by John J. Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals, Division of Paleontology, and Dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School. We recently spoke with Dr. Flynn about the exhibition’s many highlights, his fieldwork in South America, and his sightings of whales in the wild.

A whale of a tale! In a video, get the inside view from Museum curators about our newest exhibition, Whales: Giants of the Deep, which opens Saturday, March 23, 2013.