Smithsonian Voices

From the Smithsonian Museums

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Viking Women and Black-Footed Ferrets Are Coming to the Museum This Holiday Season

Have a holly jolly holiday and tune into exciting programming about the natural world at the museum this December

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How Leafcutter Ants and Other Culinary Creatures Prepare a Feast

A group of several bison with dark fur traverses a light green colored landscape of grasslands as rays of late afternoon light stream through several gold-tinged clouds. In the distance are more bison and the horizon is framed by distant mountains.

For the Love of the Buffalo

A tan woolly mammoth skeleton facing left bends its front legs and tilts its tusks towards the bottom of the frame.

Celebrate Fabulous Fossils and More Natural History Programs This October

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Four Reasons Why There Is More to the Hummingbird Than Meets the Eye

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A Final Meal for the Ages

A pink and yellow worm is covered in several tangled strands of string-like gills.

Meet the Scientist Who Studies How Polychaete Worms Wriggle Through the Ocean

Several grey, white and orange king penguins perch on top of their eggs, which are snuggly sheltered under a flap of their flabby skin between their feet.

Get To Know the Natural World’s Most Devoted Dads

A humpback whale breaches the surface of the ocean on a sunny day as three birds fly overhead.

10 Popular Scientific Discoveries From 2021

Five specimens of mistletoe fluid-preserved in clear jargs with black caps.

Five Things You Didn't Know About Mistletoe

Scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History sequenced the genomes of 363 bird species in 2020. (Brian Schmidt, Smithsonian)

10 Popular Scientific Discoveries from 2020

Although pumpkins and other gourds have become staples at Thanksgiving, they were not the only original crops in the Americas. Other crops domesticated around the same time, like sumpweed, little barley and goosefoot, are now gone from today’s palates. (Smithsonian)

Our Thanksgiving Menu Has Lost a Few Crops

Scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History discovered all sorts of cool things in 2019 including the first North American medicinal leech (Macrobdella mimicus) in more than 40 years. (Anna Phillips, Smithsonian)

10 Popular Scientific Discoveries from 2019

Many artists work hard to bring dinosaurs to life with accurate details, but often products can be out dated or be careless with details like how Diplodocus held their necks. (© N. Tamura CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

A Shopper’s Guide to Dinosaur Gifts

A chocolate model of the African Bush Elephant in the rotunda of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on top of a festive holiday cake celebrating the museum. (Smithsonian Institution)

How Elaborate Cakes Make Science Sweet

Free post cards were given to service members when they visited the US National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) in the 1940s. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image # SIA2013-07711)

How WWII Service Members Helped Shape the Smithsonian’s New Fossil Hall

Collections at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History are filled with all sorts of eerie specimens. (Clockwise from top left: Gilles San Martin via Wikimedia, Smithsonian Institution, NoahElhardt via Wikimedia, Karie Darrow)

Six Bewitching Smithsonian Specimens to Get You Ready for Halloween

Last summer, I brought my son, Toby, with me on a field work trip to Kenya for the first time. It wasn’t easy but I’m glad I did it and would definitely do it again. (Briana Pobiner, Smithsonian Institution)

How to Balance Motherhood and a STEM Career

Postcard of the Smithsonian Institution Castle sent in 1939 from my mom in Washington, D.C. to my uncles in Casper, Wyoming—nearly 80 years before I started working at the Smithsonian. (Kirk Johnson)

Museum Director Discovers His Mother’s Childhood Visit to the Smithsonian

Smithsonian paleobiologist Scott Wing digs for plant fossils in Wyoming. (Tom Nash)

Old Fossils, New Meanings: Smithsonian Exhibit Explores the History of Life and What it Means for Our Future

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I Spy… A Giant Squid Eye

Meet the Smithsonian Scientist Untangling the Branches of Hawaii’s Evolutionary Tree

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