Research lab
Chicago-based natural history museum with extensive research collections, known for paleontology, zoology, and anthropology studies and discoveries.
Two Field Museum interns named Jeanerpeton, a 309-million-year-old amphibian relative the museum had filed under a known species. A co-author says that species name has become a catchall in the collection, so more fossils filed under it may prove to be separate animals.
Reality
The best Mesozoic feather yet described came out of a coprolite from Montana's Hell Creek, and it belonged to a flightless diver the asteroid killed, which makes modern feather architecture older than the survivors.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Chris Austin met the snake on a night survey in New Guinea in 2006 and could not place it. The Zootaxa description, about twenty years later, rests on genetic analyses, scale counts and a model of where each species lives.
Reality
The MagLab's 21-tesla spectrometer found tens of thousands of carbon-based molecules in two meteorites, and noncontact atomic force microscopy at Brookhaven pinned down the shape of a handful of them.
Reality
The Field Museum holotype was mistaken for a tumour when it arrived in 1968. Sent through an X-ray CT scanner rather than cut open, the bones at the tail tip turned out to be about as normal as any viper's.
Reality
DNA from a 190-year-old type specimen in London settles which name the Himalayan pangolin carries. Species-level matching of trafficked scales gets easier; region-level tracing does not, yet.
Reality
A reddish-brown snake from New Guinea now carries a Guns N' Roses guitarist's name. Proving it was a species took at least ten years of lab and field work, and that cost is the real finding.
Reality