This month, a team of international researchers led by the American Museum of Natural History and Stony Brook University determined in unprecedented detail what the earliest ancestor of placental mammals—the widely diverse group of animals ranging from whales to bats to humans—looked like.  The Museum is teaming up with WNYC’s Radiolab to sponsor a tournament to name this early ancestor. Want to enter? 

Rising nearly 11,000 feet above sea level on the Mediterranean island of Sicily, Mt. Etna is one of the largest, most active volcanoes in the world, producing at least one eruption a year. The volcano's first lava flows of 2013 came this week, on February 19 and 20. Find out how researchers monitor and forecast the location and time of Mt. Etna's activity in this Science Bulletins video. 

A video series on amnh.tv delves into the topic of dinosaurs, which arose some 230 million years ago and thrived until most large dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago. Why? In the video series, paleontologists Mark Norell, Michael Novacek, and Lowell Dingus  explain extinction and more. 

The word "whale" may bring to mind the image of a blue whale, the largest animal ever to have lived. But did you know that dolphins and porpoises are also specialized whales? Today, there about 80 species of living whales, or cetaceans. Among these marine mammals, there are two groups: baleen and toothed.

As observers of a meteor that crashed in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region today can attest, near-earth objects that enter the earth’s atmosphere can wreak destruction. But these objects, which also include comets and asteroids, also provide clues to the solar system’s origins and could someday serve as stepping-stones to space exploration. In this podcast, Manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Objects program, Donald Yeomans, discusses the ongoing quest to find near-earth objects before they find us.