Paleontologist Silvia Pineda-Munoz discusses her research on diet and tooth evolution in mammals and how they relate to changing ecosystems.

Show Me Your Teeth: Mapping Dentition to Study Mammal Evolution 

What are lichens? How diverse are they? Manuela Dal Forno discusses this unique group of composite organisms.

Using Integrative Taxonomy to Disentangle Lichen Diversity 

Rafael Lemaitre discusses his research on the diversity of hermit crabs.

Hermit Crabs in a Bottle: the Genie is Out 

Ingrid Ahlgren discusses her research of the importance of woven mats within the culture of the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific Ocean.

Marshallese Weaving Patterns: Encoding Class, Clan, and Change Through Time 

Jeremy Feinberg discusses his research about frog populations in urban settings.

Diversity at Our Doorstep: Researching a New Frog from NY City and Surrounding Atlantic Regions 

Rebecca Fischer discuses her research on the role that light elements play in making up the Earth’s core.

What is Earth’s Core Made of? 

What are caddisflies? Paul Frandsen discusses the diversity of this insect group and why they are important not only as environmental indicators but to the medical community as well.

Reconstructing the Tree of Life of the Caddisflies—Nature’s Underwater Architects 

What is Earth Optimism? Nancy Knowlton discusses her involvement with the Earth Optimism Summit and the importance of it to educate everyone about what we can do to help save the Earth.

Earth Optimism  

Why do species live where they do and why do some groups thrive more than others? Dr. Bort (Robert) Edwards discusses his work on how habitats and environment factors affect plant diversity in North America.

The Earth Beneath My Feet: Using Soil and Climate Data to Explain Species Diversity

How do scientists monitor ocean environments down to 1,000 feet deep?  Luke Tornabene, of the DROP project, discusses how a manned submersible aids researchers in monitoring deep reef ecosystems and why this environment is important.

Ichthyological Insights from Submersible Explorations of Deep Reefs 

6 Minute Science

Matthieu Leray discusses how DNA metabarcoding can help identify species in coastal ecosystems. Using ARMS (Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures), he was able to compare the diversity of animals in oyster reefs off of the coasts of Virginia and Florida.

DNA barcoding and metabarcoding reveal diversity in cryptic benthic communities 

How fast can spiders move their chelicerae? Hannah Wood uses high-speed video cameras to document the rate that these appendages move.

Evolution of High-speed Predatory Attacks in Trap-jaw Spiders 

Monica Carlsen discusses the evolution and diversity of the large neotropical plant genus, Anthurium.

Diversification Patterns in Neotropical Plants: The case of Anthurium (arum family)

How does global warming effect mammal communities? Louise Emmons talks about her research on the Maned wolves in Bolivia and how their populations have been directly affected by fires mainly caused by climate change.

Fire and Flood: Long-term effects of savanna fires in Bolivia

Cambrian Molluscs

Integrated anatomical characters are parts of an organism’s body that evolve together, such as fingers. Peter Wagner, in the Department of Paleobiology, discusses integrated versus independent evolution of characters and talks about how trilobites from the Cambrian show less integration than animals from after the time period  He concludes that we need studies of other Cambrian animals such as molluscs to learn how general this pattern is.

Why Long Fingers Make Cambrian Molluscs Interesting

A fly is a fly, right? No. Eliana Buenaventura discusses her research on the importance and the diversity of flesh flies.

A Phylogenomic Perspective on the Radiation of the Flesh Flies

What is obsidian? Laura Waters talks about this naturally occurring volcanic glass and the experiments she has conducted in the lab to uncover how it is formed.

The Origins of Volcanic Glass: Resolving the Obsidian Paradox

What happens when birds smack right into planes? Why do we care? Who identifies the bird remains? Carla Dove and her team use museum collections to identify the culprits and this information is then used for wildlife management on airfields.

Feather Identification: When birds collide

What kind of fish has retractable eyes? Zeehan Jaafar from the Division of Fishes discusses the evolution, life history characters and terrestriality of mudskippers.

Fishes Out of Water: Phylogeny & Evolution of the Mudskippers

Imagine that you are an insect trapped on a sticky surface and then eventually fossilized. How will you ever be identified? Dale Greenwalt of the Paleobiology Department discusses fossil insect populations of Lake Kishenehn in Glacier National Park.

Unique fossil insects from the North American Eocene

Just what are prehistoric aliens? Simon Darroch from the Department of Paleobiology introduces us to the Ediacaran biota of Southern Namibia.

The Ediacara biota and first mass extinction of metazoan life.

What causes lizard populations to separate into two distinct populations or possibly form new species? Andrew Gottscho discusses his research on lizard populations on Baja California, Mexico and whether or not new populations were formed by dispersal or due to some kind of geological barrier.

The Mysterious ‘Mid-Peninsular Break’ of Baja California, Mexico: Simultaneous Vicariance or Idiosyncratic Dispersal? 

How can ethnographic collections provide information on the relationship between countries? Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel discusses her work about the presence of Americans in Fiji via the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1840.

The American Presence in Fiji (South Pacific), through Smithsonian Ethnographic Collections 

How do nocturnal birds see at night and what is the evolutionary history of this adaptation in birds? Noor White discusses two potential scenarios for how nightvision evolved within a bird group that includes of hummingbirds and nightjars.

Evolving into the Night: Visual Adaptations to Nocturnality in Birds

Can rocks be created with an andesitic composition from very simple, low degree melting on an asteroid-sized body? According to Kat Gardner-Vandy, yes, and she explains why.

Melting Meteorites: Solving the Mysteries of the Early Solar System 

Liz Zimmer uses genomic sequences and micromorphology to identify spore-bearing vascular plants, the Lycophytes.

Whose DNA Is It? 

The Best Multi-Part Documentaries, with documentaries on Obama, Federer vs Nadal, the making of Star Wars, Netflix vs Blockbuster and more. Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!

Best Multi-Part Documentaries

The best podcast episodes on non-current politics. Covering topics such as universal basic income, democracy, poverty & justice and more. For anyone interested in learning more about politics that affect that world, not just now, but in the longer term. Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!