From 75-foot dinosaurs to saber-toothed tigers, an overwhelming number of animals stopped moving ages ago. But their remains are still talking.

At the American Museum of Natural History, scientists pore over nearly 5 million fossilized specimens across many different collections, looking back in time to piece together what these unique organisms looked like and how they behaved.

In celebration of National Fossil Day, marked today by the National Park Service and the American Geological Institute, dig into some of these fascinating specimens from the Museum’s fourth-floor Fossil Halls, highlighted below.

“I think being allowed to go to space at 30 is wonderful,” says Bertalan Farkas, Hungary’s first cosmonaut, in Marian Kiss’sSpace Sailors, which makes its U.S. premiere at the Margaret Mead Film Festival on Sunday, November 13. “But one mustn’t forget—if you reach your zenith so young, what will you do then?”

Now in its fourteenth season at the Museum, The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter! draws thousands of visitors each year, transporting them to a tropical ecosystem lush with vivid, live flowers and filled with hundreds of spectacular butterflies and moths. But while the flora and fauna are quite real, the conservatory is the product of careful planning and design by the Museum’s Exhibition Department, which creates a “natural” garden using artificial lighting,precipitation, and climate control.

Can you imagine an elevator to the Moon, a lunar habitat, or colonies on Mars? In anticipation of the upcoming exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, opening on November 19, the Museum wants to see what you think will be humanity’s next steps in space—in three minutes or less. 

When 12-year-old Katelyn took a field trip to a butterfly exhibit, she wondered why butterflies chose certain flowers over others when it came time to feed.

The question led Katelyn to conduct an experiment that tracked painted lady butterflies’ flower preferences. Her project, which earned her a 2011 Young Naturalist Award, is described in the essay Butterfly Buffet: The Feeding Preferences of Painted Ladies.