Latest additions to our Paleobiology Department web pages

Digging the Fossil Record
What our paleontologists do in the field and many of our fossils that you won't find on display. Our blog presents behind-the-scenes photos, field reports from our scientists, research news, archival images, paleo art, and many other stories about our collections and our work, past and present.

Joseph Cushman
Joseph Cushman is a founding father of American micropaleontology. He was a pioneer in the use of foraminifera to support oil exploration in North America, developing a classification method that for the first time allowed foraminifera to be used for borehole correlation.

FossiLab
A real laboratory located here in the Dinosaur halls of our Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists and volunteers work in this glass-enclosed space unpacking new fossil shipments from the field, prepare fossils for study and remove the rock matrix that encases them, piece together broken fossils, and perform many other fossil preparation and conservation tasks.

Backyard Dinosaurs
Explore life in the nation's capital during the Early Cretaceous Period, 110 million years ago. Built around the question “How do we know?” this website reveals how scientists gather and interpret fossil and geologic evidence about extinct organisms and ancient ecosystems, and how they collaborate with artists to reconstruct accurate images of ancient life.

Trackways
Videos from the Prehistoric Footprints National Monument in New Mexico. Featuring the work of scientists from the NMNH Department of Paleobiology, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, the University of Illinois, and the Bureau of Land Management. Discussions of the Fossils, Geology, Public Access.

Constructing Archival Jackets for Storage of Vertebrate Specimens
The Smithsonian Institution has taken the lead in the design and construction of custom-fit padded jackets for the conservation of fossil vertebrate specimens. This link will take you to a short description and video on the latest methods to make our innovative archival plaster jackets.

FossiLab posts to the Natural History Museum's blog
Our paleobiologists travel to field sites around the world in search of fossils. Many of their discoveries are shipped back to FossiLab, located in a public viewing area of our museum, where trained volunteers prepare them for scientific study, display, and final storage. Here’s a recent entry describing ongoing work in FossiLab.

Pyenson Lab
Curator of fossil marine mammals Nick Pyenson and his lab members post their latest discoveries, events, and fieldwork related on the Pyenson Lab blog, part of NMNH's Typepad blog series.

Dispatches From the Field (Smithsonian Magazine)
Day by day reports from past field seasons: You can follow our paleobiologists Scott Wing as he looked for 56-million-year-old fossil plants in Wyoming (here) and Matt Carrano as his team unearths dinosaur bones and tracksites (here).

Other Smithsonian blogs with Paleobiological news

Smithsonian Science - Paleontology
Here's a link to the Paleontology section at Smithsonian Science, a new web site featuring articles, photos and videos of Smithsonian scientific research that is seriously amazing and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

Ocean Portal Blog
The Ocean Portal inspires awareness, understanding, and stewardship of the world's Ocean. Also check out the Ocean over Time section that presents some of the weird and wondrous life forms of the ancient sea s they evolve into organisms we know today