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Dr. Darrel Frost is interested in the evolutionary origin and diversification of amphibians and reptiles. His efforts have resulted in revised classifications of iguanian lizards, as well as a general classification and revision of all amphibians. The latter was based on the largest phylogenetic tree ever calculated for a vertebrate group. Dr. Frost also maintains a large online taxonomic catalogue of the world's living amphibians. He feels strongly that meticulously prepared catalogues help knit the world's scientific community together by providing workers in the developing world with access to current literature on the biodiversity of living amphibians.

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Jackrabbits are among the most difficult subjects, says project taxidermist George Dante. In this video, the team finds the jackrabbits are in relatively good shape except for the antelope jackrabbit's ears. A key challenge: painting the delicate interior of the ears to re-create their characteristic translucence.

The restored Hall of North American Mammals reopened October 2012.

PHOTOGRAPHY
AMNH/ Conservation Department

VIDEO
AMNH/J. Bauerle
AMNH/J. Reynolds
S. Sfarra

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Dr. Robert Carneiro's fields of interest in anthropology are threefold: South American ethnology, cultural evolution, and political evolution. He has done field projects on three indigenous tribes inhabiting the Amazon basin: the Kuikuru Indians of central Brazil, the Amahuaca of eastern Peru, and the Yanoramo of southern Venezuela. Currently he is working on a study of manioc, the staple crop of most Amazonian Indians, and is about to start work on a monograph on the Kuikuru. Dr. Carneiro studies the ways in which societies have evolved from simple, autonomous Neolithic villages into ever-larger and more complex polities, passing through various stages of development, including the chiefdom, and culminating in the formation of pre-industrial states and empires, and ascertaining the factors that best account for this transition.

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Dr. Novacek's studies concern patterns of evolution and relationships among organisms, particularly mammals. His interests have ranged from paleontological evidence to new data on DNA sequences. He has led paleontological expeditions to Baja California, Mexico; the Andes Mountains of Chile; and the Yemen Arab Republic in search of fossil mammals and dinosaurs. He also is one of the team leaders of the joint American Museum of Natural History/Mongolian Academy of Sciences ongoing expeditions to the Gobi Desert, begun in 1990.

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Dr. Mac Low's work focuses on understanding the formation of planets, stars, and galaxies. At the smallest scales, he is studying the interaction of planets with their natal circumstellar disks. At scales of less than one light year, he has simulated the behavior of self-gravitating, supersonic, magnetized turbulence to understand the formation of the dense cloud cores in which protostars are observed. At scales of hundreds to thousands of light years, he is studying the influence of multiple supernova explosions on interstellar gas, and how clouds of star-forming molecular gas form. Finally, at the galactic scale of tens of thousands of light years, he studies the large-scale formation of stars in galaxies.

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Dr. Nancy Simmons specializes in the morphology and evolutionary biology of bats (Chiroptera). Together with several collaborators, she is developing a data set of morphological characters scored in species representing all major clades of bats. These data include new information gained from high-resolution CT scans of rare bats and are being combined with DNA sequence data to develop a robust higher-level phylogeny for Chiroptera. With collaborators, she is doing an in-depth study of the evolution of megabats -- flying foxes and their relatives -- using both molecular and morphological data. Dr. Simmons is also working with an expert on echolocation behavior to develop a method for coding features of echolocation calls for phylogenetic analysis.

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Over the last few decades, paleontological artists have often adorned their depictions of extinct, non-avian dinosaurs with a rainbow of picturesque color patterns, in stark contrast to depictions from the earlier part of the 20th Century. In part, this shift reflects the scientific switch from viewing dinosaurs as drab relatives of crocodiles and lizards to viewing dinosaurs as closer relatives of birds. But is there any direct fossil evidence for this change? Well, the answer is no... and yes.

No fossils of extinct dinosaurs, including "mummies" complete with fossilized skin impressions, have yet revealed the true color of the dinosaur's skin, at least in terms of what we usually think of as skin. There are fossils of a couple of turtles from the Cenozoic Era that are thought to preserve the pattern of pigmentation on the shell. Nonetheless, in terms of non-feathered dinosaurs, such as Apatosaurus and duckbills, no evidence for skin color has yet been found.

Recently, however, a great wealth of astounding fossils representing small, feathered dinosaurs that are not birds has been collected in Early Cretaceous rocks in China, especially near Liaoning. Fossilized feathers, basically modified scales that grow in the skin, have been found on numerous specimens. In 2008, researchers discovered microscopic structures, called melanosomes, within fossilized feathers of an ancient bird. Different kinds of melanosomes create different colors in the feathers.

Following this discovery in 2010, two teams of researchers reported finding melanosomes preserved in feathers of two, small, Chinese, non-avian dinosaurs -- Sinosauropteryx and Anchiornis. In the more comprehensive study of Anchiornis, in which 29 samples were analyzed from feathers all over the body of one specimen, revealed that this 155-million-year-old, feathered dinosaur, about the size of a chicken, possessed black-and-white stripped wings and a rusty brown crest of feathers along the top and back of its skull.