In the past 80 years, the plumage of the Horned Lark has undergone a relatively rapid color change, which scientists believe is due to the conversion of Imperial Valley desert into farmland, which has caused the landscape to change from light to dark. This could represent the first example known among birds evolving different colors within recorded history.
Nature isn’t something found only on trails and in reserves and we need your help documenting it. That includes taking photos of lizard love...wait, what?
Looking for something to do from home that still connects you to nature? We got you covered. This April marks the first Global Citizen Science month, and as luck would have it, it is also the first digital Global Citizen Science month.
A new way to use collections? Using material from specimens within the Museum's botany collection, researchers may be on the path to a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease - and maybe more.
We don’t know much about our native ringtail cats, but we can say two things for certain: they are not actually cats (they are in the racoon family), and they love strawberry jam. The Nat is working with the San Diego Zoo to study these elusive creatures and understand why they keep ending up as roadkill in our foothill areas.
Some bird species museum scientists have been studying are spreading in a more southerly or downslope direction over time, which is contrary to the expectations of climate warming. Why is this happening? They attribute these shifts to three main factors, all directly resulting from human influence.
Scientists from The Nat have documented range shifts—changes to where an organism lives or occurs—of numerous animals, which are being analyzed in the broader context of climate warming and habitat change. One of these is the expansion of the Zone-tailed Hawk into California, where it had not been previously observed.
In the spirit of the decade-spanning top ten lists that abound in our collective news feeds, we asked our curators to nominate two to three of the best specimens that were collected or discovered in the 2010s. We got 17 nominations, and musuem staff and volunteers voted to narrow the list down to “The Top 10 Specimens of the 2010s.”
One hundred years ago, scientists—both amateur and classically trained—found plants in the Baja California Peninsula that now seem to have disappeared. No one has seen them growing in the wild for decades—until now. Multiple recent expeditions have led to the rediscovery of some species. Where did they go and how did we find them?