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The U.S. Capitol: Building Democracy

The U.S. Capitol: Building Democracy

15 hours ago
In 1800, when only the first of its wings had been completed, the United States Capitol held its ...
Carcharodontosaurus: The Moroccan Superpredator

Carcharodontosaurus: The Moroccan Superpredator

10 days ago
Deadly, gigantic, and hungry, the Carcharodontosaurus was one of the most fearsome predators of t...
The Space Shuttles: 30 Years of Flight

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana

Oftentimes weddings are tight-knit affairs, a bride and groom surrounded by friends and family, b...
To the Moon and Back: The Story of Apollo 11

To the Moon and Back: The Story of Apollo 11

On this day, July 20, fifty-four years ago, human beings first walked on the surface of the moon....
Portals to the Past: The La Brea Tar Pits

Portals to the Past: The La Brea Tar Pits

In the heart of Los Angeles’ sprawling cityscape, a rare geological phenomenon offers a glimpse  ...
How the Dinosaurs Got their Feathers

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...
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali In and Out of the Ring

The Greatest: Muhammad Ali In and Out of the Ring

In 1964, a loud, handsome boxer from Louisville, Kentucky shocked the sports world by beating the...
Age of Vikings: Bridging the Old and New Worlds

Age of Vikings: Bridging the Old and New Worlds

In 793 CE, a longship appeared off the coast of Lindisfarne, a small English island that held lit...
Paleoart: Bringing the Past to Life

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 Apple II: the Revolutionary Personal Computer

The history of modern computing is a long road that stretches from the earliest computers that co...
Steve Jobs at Apple-II launch.

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...
Creating Tatooine: Filming Star Wars in Tunisia

Creating Tatooine: Filming Star Wars in Tunisia

When George Lucas sought out a location to stand in for a “galaxy far, far away,” he settled on T...
A Millennia of Chain Mail

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

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?

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

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

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

Woolly Mammoths: Giants of the Pleistocene

Beneath the surface of the North Sea, a graveyard from another chapter of the Earth’s history lie...
A Carcharodontosaurus skull.

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...
A cast of a Maiasaura fossil emerging from its egg.

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

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)

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

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 ...
A Triceratops skeleton.

Triceratops: More Than T-Rex Food

In the popular imagination, Triceratops is too often understood simply in the context of its pred...
Portrait paleontologist Mary Anning.

Mary Anning the Fossil Hunter

Decades before Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, another equally  controversial ...
Seymour Cray posing with his supercomputer the Cray-1

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...
A picture of the Smithsonian Castle

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

Stromatolites: The Earliest Life

Charles Darwin had a problem: with a poor fossil record preceding the Cambrian explosion, his the...
Othniel Charles Marsh and his men digging for fossils in Wyoming.

The Bone Wars: Paleontology's Greatest Rivalry

Many of our early insights into the dinosaurs of North America owe themselves to the dramatic riv...
A T. Rex and Triceratops in battle

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 ...
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