What strange new species lurk beneath? Join Museum Curator Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist who has been featured on The Colbert Report, as she answers this question and discusses her teams adventures and amazing discoveries in Africa’s Congo River, the deepest in the world.
Surrounded by magnificent geological specimens in the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, enjoy the Museum after hours with music, drinks, and thought-provoking conversation at the next installment of the popular new SciCafe series at the American Museum of Natural History. SciCafe features cutting-edge science, cocktails, and conversation and takes place on the first Wednesday of every month.
SciCafe’s Mysteries of the Congo: Exploring the World’s Deepest River takes place in AMNH’s Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth on Wednesday, January 6th at 7 p.m.
What’s driving the rapid fish evolution in Lower Congo? The Congo Project, an ongoing research effort led by Stiassny and Museum ichthyologist Bob Schelly, is converging on an answer: the river’s turbulence itself. Their work is featured in a new production by Science Bulletins, the Museum’s high-definition current-science video program.
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After several field seasons identifying new species, Stiassny realized her team was only scratching the surface of the powerful forces that can steer fish evolution. “We hadn’t been looking at the river the way a fish would look at the river,” she says. “We didn’t really know anything about what was below the surface.” So in a recent field season, the fish scientists teamed with water scientists as well as with world-class kayakers to make a historic riverbed survey. The researchers rigged one of the kayaks with a GPS logger and an echo sounder, a device that directs pulses of sound waves toward the river bottom to measure its depth. Read more »
On December 17, it was announced that Dr. Flynn was elected by his peers for “distinguished contributions in vertebrate paleontology, especially carnivore evolution and faunal succession in South America, and for development of the graduate school at the Museum.”
“This honor emphasizes the value of Museum-based research and encyclopedic collections,” says Dr. Flynn. “My research is highly inter-disciplinary, integrating field and laboratory work, spanning many facets of geology and biology.” Dr. Flynn’s research helps resolve interesting questions like the history of the Andes and the pattern body and brain size changes during the evolution of carnivores.
An eight-foot-tall pink paper elephant made a brief appearance at the American Museum of Natural History for a photo opportunity around the Origami Holiday Tree in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. The giant pink paper Pachyderm, created through the paper-folding wizardry of celebrated Origami artist Sok Song, was photographed for an upcoming book highlighting Song’s work. Song’s creations — large and small — have graced fashion runways, advertising spreads, and the Origami Holiday Tree at the Museum.
The Origami Holiday Tree has marked the start of the holiday season at the Museum for more than 30 years. Following this year’s theme of Origami, A to Z, the 13-foot tree is covered with paper letters and alphabetically-corresponding objects from an “A” and an Apatosaurus to a “Z” and a zebra.
Writing in The Economist’s culture blog, Alice Gregory raves about the “immersive experience” of the Museum’s Traveling the Silk Road exhibition, adding that it “allows for a kind of museum experience that is all too rare. This is a very fine show, enlightening, gratifying….I found myself transformed.” Read more on The Economist’s Moreintelligentlife.com.
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John Flynn, 
