gryzonie: American Museum of Natural History

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2,50…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH; also known as the Field Museum) is a private–public natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational and scientific programs, as well as its extensive scientific specimen and artifact collections. A private nonprofit institution, the museum operates in close partnership with the municipal government agency Chicago Park District, which owns the land and building. The museum is run by a private Board of Trustees and funded through a combination of ticket sales, memberships, donations, endowments, and grants, along with some public fundin…

Evidence: 32 • authority: 72

Evidence: 32 • authority: 72

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is a museum located in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, next to the California Science Center. It is the largest natural and historical museum in the Western United States, with a collection of nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts covering 4.5 billion years of history, it is also home to the rarest gemstone in the world, Kyawthuite. This large collection consists of not only specimens for exhibition but also vast research collections housed on and offsite. The museum is associated with one other museum in Greater Los Angeles: the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park. The two museums work together to achieve their common mis…

Evidence: 32 • authority: 92

Evidence: 23 • authority: 92

Re-evaluating molecular clock maximum age calibrations revives pre-Ediacaran divergence estimates for animals.. Divergent models persist for the emergence of animals. Lipid biomarkers suggest animals originated before 635 million years ago (Ma), but their body fossil record extends to only 574 Ma. Molecular clocks might differentiate between these records, but we demonstrate how their accuracy and precision hinge on maximum age calibrations. We evaluate the Ediacaran Weng'an Biota (China) as a maximum calibration utilizing microfossils from the Kheseen Biota (Mongolia). These two biotas have similar preservation and microfossil assemblages, containing no definitive animals. The Kheseen Biot…

Evidence: 23 • authority: 92

Soaring Systematics: An Evaluation of Biogeography and Flight Behavior in Dragonflies and Damselflies (Insecta: Odonata) Using Phylogenomics.. Dragonflies and damselflies (Insecta: Odonata) are descended from what were most likely the first winged animals, which flew ~320 million years ago (Ma). They comprise ~6400 extant species distributed across all continents except Antarctica. Examination of long-standing hypotheses regarding the role of flight behavior and wing morphology in shaping the global distribution of odonates has been limited by spatial and taxonomic scope. Here, we leverage mobilized trait and distribution data derived from specimens and literature combined with a uniquely c…

Evidence: 23 • authority: 92