Story Topics | Natural History Museum

A Ptango With Pterosaurs

How do the biggest wings the Earth has ever seen stack up to the flying reptiles of fantasy–dragons?

Burro-Ing Into the Past

How introduced donkeys and the indigenous pumas that love (to hunt) them are helping to resurrect extinct food webs in Death Valley

Ailurarctos reconstruction Mauricio Anton

Research and Collections

Eating bamboo? It's all in the wrist.

An ancient fossil reveals the earliest panda on an exclusively bamboo diet and the evolutionary history of panda's false thumbs

Research That Rocks

Our breathtaking backyard state park

Before Dinosaurs Got Big

Meet Earth’s first giant—a humongous new species of ichthyosaur—only at NHM!

Mammoths, meet the metaverse

Paleontologists from La Brea Tar Pits develop a whole herd of scientifically accurate extinct animals to use in AR and VR

Research and Collections

Fragmentary Fossils Help Tell the Whole Evolutionary Story

Paleontological “twigs” from our fossil past can help us reconstruct branches on the tree of life

Artist Mark Dion's Deep Dive Into The Tar Pits

What blows this celebrated artist's mind? Microscopic ice age plants and rat poop

Earth's First Giant

The two-meter skull of a humongous new ichthyosaur species, Earth’s first known giant creature, reveals how both the extinct marine reptiles and modern whales became giants.

Talking Tar Pits Turkeys

Dig into some ancient turkey with our Tar Pits team member, Preparator Laura Tewksbury.