Featured series 
Tag: Museum of Comparative Zoology
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Health
When threatened, a few African frogs can morph toes into claws
Biologists at Harvard University have determined that some African frogs carry concealed weapons: When threatened, these species puncture their own skin with sharp bones in their toes, using the bones as claws capable of wounding predators.
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Campus & Community
Ernst Mayr
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 20, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Ernst Mayr, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Mayr helped lay the foundations of contemporary evolutionary biology.
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Campus & Community
Museum of Science to honor McCarthy with Walker Prize
James McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, will accept the 2008 Walker Prize from the Boston Museum of Science on April 7. The prize recognizes “meritorious published scientific investigation and discovery” in any scientific field.
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Science & Tech
Foraging for forest frogs
In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guides were the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted…
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Science & Tech
Yale honors E. O. Wilson with Verrill Medal
Yale honors Wilson with Verrill Medal Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus E.O. Wilson received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History on Wednesday (Oct. 17)…
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Health
First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old
Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.
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Campus & Community
A tale of two scholars: The Darwin debate at Harvard
Few people have left a more indelible imprint on Harvard than Louis Agassiz.
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Health
Big brains better for birds
As you might guess, big-brained birds survive better in the wild than those less cerebral for their size. Scientists guessed that too, but they had to prove it to themselves.
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Campus & Community
Eclipsed for decades, Harvard’s glass animals step out
Long overshadowed by their famed floral kin, some of the exquisite 19th century glass animals housed at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) have finally hit the road for a Minnesota exhibit – the first time in Harvard’s nearly 130-year ownership that the rare sculptures are known to have left Cambridge.
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Campus & Community
Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection
Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime – within…
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Campus & Community
Students search for Thompson Island’s hoppers
Education met hands-on science on Boston Harbor’s Thompson Island on Oct. 9, 2006, as roughly 100 Harvard undergraduates fanned out from beach to beach collecting insects to be included in…
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Campus & Community
Finding a fossilized needle in an Arctic haystack
The first season searching Arctic Canada for a fossil that would illuminate how our ancestors first crawled onto land proved Harvard Professor Farish Jenkins’ explorer’s maxim: Never go any place…
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Science & Tech
Newly found species fills evolutionary gap between fish and land animals
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years…
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Health
Dominican insects, digitized
It’s the brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes of the Dominican insects that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. It’s the alien forms magnified for all to see clearly…
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Campus & Community
Wing color not just for looks
Harvard and Russian researchers have documented natural selection’s role in the creation of new species through a process called reinforcement, where butterfly wing colors differ enough to avoid confusion with…
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Health
Zoologist says in animal kingdom, less is more
Harvard researcher Piotr Naskrecki hopes his new book, “The Smaller Majority” (Harvard University Press, 2005), will win over some new advocates for the tiny creatures he has spent his life…
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Health
Ivory-billed woodpecker: Ornithology’s holy grail
Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison almost flopped into the mud of Arkansas’ Bayou de View in their haste to get out of the canoe. They crashed through the undergrowth after…
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Health
How ant (and human) societies might grow
Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson remains fascinated with the highly organized societies of ants, bees, wasps, termites, and humans. He and Bert Holldobler, with whom he shared a…
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Health
Solving the mystery of a centuries-old plague
Edward O. Wilson identified two different ant species in investigating the mystery of centuries-old plagues, a tropical fire ant in the early 1500s and an introduced African ant in the…
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Health
The tale of the tail
Sharks’ tails have always mystified biologists. Their relatives, hundreds of different species of fish, happily push themselves through the water with symmetrical tails that move from side to side. But…
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Science & Tech
Beetle mania
Grain weevils alone cost the global economy about $35 billion, or a third of the world’s grain crop, every year. Various other beetle species damage dozens of crops including bamboo,…
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Science & Tech
Daddy longlegs have a global reach
Huge numbers of arachnid and insect species remain unknown. Arachnologists like Gonzalo Giribet, toiling in relative obscurity, routinely identify new species – and their work is far from over. Giribet,…
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Science & Tech
Oldest mammal is found
When dinosaurs ruled the world, scampering around their feet were platoons of diminutive insect-eating animals, part reptile, part something new. When the giant reptiles and many other animals were wiped…
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Health
Understanding how fish swim
The pattern is hard to see at first because the movement seems to happen in the blink of an eye.
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Science & Tech
Charles Schaff brings knack for finding fossils to field — and Harvard
Charles Schaff ‘s official job description isn’t “fossil hunter.” He is a curatorial associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Schaff, however, makes regular trips to look for fossils in…