
The U.S. Capitol: Building Democracy
4 days ago
In 1800, when only the first of its wings had been completed, the United States Capitol held its ...

Carcharodontosaurus: The Moroccan Superpredator
14 days ago
Deadly, gigantic, and hungry, the Carcharodontosaurus was one of the most fearsome predators of t...

The Space Shuttles: 30 Years of Flight
During its three decades of operation, NASA's Space Shuttle program delivered 133 successful miss...

Ichthyosaur and the Origins of Paleontology
During the Mesozoic Era, as the shifting continents were stalked by lumbering Tyrannosaurus and f...

Finding Fossils at Mazon Creek
At Mazon Creek in Illinois, collectors gather to search the riverside for ancient stones that...

The Teeth of the Cave Bear
Over 25,000 years ago, the massive cave bear, Ursus spelaeus, shared the planet with our early an...

The Last Flight of the Hindenburg
On May 3, 1937 the Hindenburg set off on its final transatlantic flight from Frankfurt, Germany t...

Living off the Land: The Oreodonts of North America
At the end of the Eocene, Earth’s ecosystems began to change. A shift in climate and a decline in...

The Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana
Oftentimes weddings are tight-knit affairs, a bride and groom surrounded by friends and family, b...

How the Dinosaurs Got their Feathers
66 million years ago, the K/PG extinction event brought the Age of Dinosaurs to a violent end. Ho...

Paleoart: Bringing the Past to Life
What do you see when you imagine a dinosaur? Whatever image springs to mind owes itself to the wo...

The Apple II: the Revolutionary Personal Computer
The history of modern computing is a long road that stretches from the earliest computers that co...

Inventing the Future: Steve Jobs and Apple
Beginning life as the adopted son of working-class parents, Steven Paul Jobs rose to the height o...

A Millennia of Chain Mail
Bookended by the collapse of the western Roman Empire in 476 and the beginnings of the Renaissanc...

California's Gateway: Building the Golden Gate Bridge
From the comfort of the present day, the Golden Gate Bridge seems like an inevitability, as much ...

Where Did the Moon Come From?
So much of what we know about distant space is a mystery, but even our closest cosmic neighbor re...

Shrinking the World: The First Transatlantic Cable
Ten years after Samuel F. B. Morse sent the first telegraph message in 1844, the world was hooked...

JUICE Mission Blasts Off to Jupiter
The question of alien life has long preoccupied astrobiologists and other scientists, but it coul...

Woolly Mammoths: Giants of the Pleistocene
Beneath the surface of the North Sea, a graveyard from another chapter of the Earth’s history lie...

Where the Spinosaurus Roam: Morocco’s Kem Kem Formation
In the thick of a brackish swamp that stretches for miles in every direction, a lumbering Spinosa...

Starting off Small: The Study of Dinosaur Eggs
The egg is an incredible natural structure designed to protect and support a growing body until i...

Libyan Desert Glass: The Rock of God
Scattered among the Sahara’s billowing dunes, hidden amongst the grains of sand, lie small glassy...

Is the Megalodon Still Alive? (Nope)
Sometimes the line between the animal kingdom and mythological creatures is a blurry one. The Oto...

The Galaxy in Your Gut: Microbes and Humans
Right now as you read these words, no matter who you are or where you live, tens of trillions of ...

Triceratops: More Than T-Rex Food
In the popular imagination, Triceratops is too often understood simply in the context of its pred...

Mary Anning the Fossil Hunter
Decades before Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, another equally controversial ...

The Fastest Computer in the World: Seymour Cray and the Cray-1
Computer advancement is always a matter of miniaturization. Data that once took a car-sized compu...

The Miniature World: A History of the Smithsonian
Dotted along the National Mall, in the heart of Washington DC, the Smithsonian’s museums contain ...

Stromatolites: The Earliest Life
Charles Darwin had a problem: with a poor fossil record preceding the Cambrian explosion, his the...

The Bone Wars: Paleontology's Greatest Rivalry
Many of our early insights into the dinosaurs of North America owe themselves to the dramatic riv...

The Dinosaur Tyrant: A Look at the T. Rex
Measuring 40ft (12m) in length and weighing upwards of 14 tons, Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the ...

Chelyabinsk 10 Years Later
Ten years ago today, a flash of light streaked across the sky over Western Russia. For a brief mo...

The RMS Lusitania (1907-1915)
It was one of the largest and fastest ships of its time, but today the RMS Lusitania is remembere...

How to Start a Collection
So you want to start a collection, but you’re faced with the same daunting question every novice ...

Plesiosaurus: Mary Anning's Sea Monster
Featuring a long, snake-like neck and a stout body equipped with slender paddles, Plesiosaurs are...

The History of Giving Gifts
Throughout human history, across wildly different civilizations and cultures, certain universal b...
More from Cool Things!

The Trilobite Diet
5 days ago
A digital reconstruction of the trilobite's gut contents
Trilobites hold a prized position in the...

Retrieved Asteroid Material Arrives on Earth!
8 days ago
The mission's capsule, having landed in Utah (NASA)
Yesterday on September 24, an asteroid touche...

The Ancient History of Man's Best Friend
Canis lupus familiaris
The relationship between dogs and humans stretches across thousands of yea...