Top Discoveries at the National Museum of Natural History in 2024

Fungus-farming ants, fossilized footprints and a prehistoric critter named after a Muppet are just a few of the year’s most notable findings

Jack Tamisiea

December 31, 2024

An *Apterostigma collare* worker ant tends to its garden of coral fungi. Alex Wild

In 2024, researchers at the National Museum of Natural History contributed to hundreds of scientific publications. These papers named new species, described geological processes and provided insights into the interactions between early human species.

Here are the top discoveries by NMNH scientists that garnered the most headlines in 2024.

Earth’s global temperature has drastically changed over the past 485 million years

None — Using a method to integrate data from both the geologic record and climate models, scientists created this curve to illustrate how Earth's global surface temperature has fluctuated over the past 485 million years, Emily J. Judd et al.

During the Phanerozoic Eon, a vast swath of geological time that began around 540 million years ago, life diversified, populated land and endured multiple mass extinctions. All of these evolutionary milestones happened amid a backdrop of Earth’s constantly changing climate. However, the fragmented fossil record has made it difficult to gauge just how much the planet’s temperature has fluctuated across the eon.

Museum paleobiologists Scott Wing and Brian Huber recently worked with an international team of researchers to create a detailed curve of Earth’s global surface temperature over the past 485 million years. Their findings, published in the journal Science, reveal that global mean surface temperatures have varied more than previously thought and are strongly correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Emily Judd, a former postdoctoral researcher at the museum, helped lead the effort, which utilized an approach called data assimilation to combine data from the geologic record and climate models. “This method was originally developed for weather forecasting [but] instead of using it to forecast future weather, here we’re using it to hindcast ancient climates,” Judd said.

The climate curve revealed that Earth’s current global temperature is cooler than during much of the Phanerozoic. But greenhouse gas emissions are currently warming Earth’s temperature much faster than any other time during the Phanerozoic. This rapid rate of warming puts species and ecosystems around the world at risk.

Bioluminescence in ancient corals evolved 540 million years ago

A variety of creatures, including glow worms, squids and anglerfish, utilize chemical reactions in their bodies to produce light. Known as bioluminescence, this behavior has evolved nearly 100 different times, making it difficult to discern when exactly animals first began to glow.

A team of researchers, including Andrea Quattrini, the museum’s curator of corals, and Danielle DeLeo, a museum research associate and former postdoc, recently examined the evolution of octocorals. This ancient group of animals includes soft corals and sea fans, many of which produce bioluminescence when disturbed.

The team compared octocoral fossils and genetics to create an evolutionary tree for the group. Their analysis, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in April, revealed that octocorals began producing bioluminescence at least 540 million years ago. This is nearly 300 million years older than the previous estimate for the dawn of bioluminescence.

Fossilized footprints reveal that early human relatives crossed paths

1.5 million years ago, on the outskirts of an ancient lake in what is now northern Kenya, human relatives called hominids left their footprints. These tracks were not one size fits all—one set of prints was left by a flat foot with a wide, big toe, while other sets were left by a foot with a higher arch.

These fossilized footprints were recently analyzed by an international team of researchers that included Kay Behrensmeyer, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology. Due to the differing anatomy of the footprints, the researchers concluded that the prints belonged to two distinct species of ancient human relatives. The flat-footed prints were left by Paranthropus boisei, a member of a now extinct group of hominids, while the high-arched prints were made by Homo erectus, a close relative to modern humans.

The team’s findings, published in November in the journal Science, provide the first direct evidence of two different human relatives simultaneously occupying the same immediate landscape.

To protect biodiversity, researchers look to the moon

As Earth’s biodiversity dwindles, creating a stockpile of biological samples has never been more important. And to keep this trove safe, a group of scientists is looking to store it at an otherworldly location: the moon.

It may sound like science fiction, but a group of Smithsonian scientists and their collaborators recently explored the efficacy of creating a lunar biorepository to safeguard Earth’s species in a paper published in the journal BioScience in July. The project is inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, an international genebank of food crops, which is currently threatened by climate change.

The moon may eventually provide a safer alternative. The moon’s craters are cold enough for cryogenic preservation without the need for electricity or liquid nitrogen. However, the logistics of sending samples to the moon is still hazy. The team, which included Lynne Parenti, the museum’s curator of Indo-Pacific freshwater and coastal fishes, are currently testing transportation methods on cells from starry gobies (Asterropteryx semipunctata), a common species of reef fish.

Ant agriculture began in the aftermath of an asteroid impact

When humans began cultivating crops thousands of years ago, they were millions of years late to the agricultural revolution. Several lineages were already growing their own food, including multiple groups of fungus-farming ants.

Entomologist Ted Schultz, the museum’s curator of ants, has spent 35 years studying how ants’ knack for growing fungi evolved. In a paper published in the journal Science in October, Schultz and his colleagues analyzed genetic data from hundreds of species of fungi and ants to craft detailed evolutionary trees.

They discovered that ants and fungi have been intertwined for 66 million years. This coincides with the cataclysmic asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. While the event was catastrophic for dinosaurs, it was a boon for fungi, which proliferated as they consumed all the dead plant material in the aftermath of the asteroid strike. This brought them into close contact with ants. It took the insects another 40 million years to master the advanced agricultural practices seen in leafcutter ants today.

A family tree of flowering plants blooms

Flowering plants, or angiosperms, account for roughly 90% of plants on Earth. Organizing this diverse group of flora is daunting, but researchers are finding helpful genetic clues preserved in the plants’ DNA.

In recent years, an international team of nearly 300 researchers, including museum research associate Robert Soreng, worked together to analyze DNA from over 9,500 species of flowering plants. This sprawling dataset included several species that have gone extinct and only persist in museum herbariums.

The team’s findings, published in the journal Nature in April, yield a detailed tree of life for flowering plants. This record is the most comprehensive look yet at angiosperm evolution and provides novel insights into how various botanical groups are related.

Ancestral amphibian with a famous namesake discovered in museum’s collection

270 million years ago, an ancestral amphibian that resembled a stout salamander lived in a primeval swamp in what is now Texas. The creature’s fossilized skull was unearthed by the late Smithsonian paleontologist Nicholas Hotton in 1984. However, decades would pass before researchers gave the fossil a closer look.

In March, a team of scientists led by Calvin So, a doctoral student at the George Washington University, and Arjan Mann, a postdoctoral paleontologist at the museum, formally described the skull as a novel species of proto-amphibian in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. They named the new critter Kermitops gratus after the iconic Muppet, Kermit the Frog.

Kermitops’s skull, which measures just over an inch long and possesses large, oval-shaped eye sockets, displays traits seen in both older tetrapod groups and younger amphibians.

Fossil grape seeds reveal fruit thrived after mass extinction

When an asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, it sparked a mass extinction event that wiped out nearly half of all plant species alive at the time. But it was not all doom and gloom for flora. The extinction event opened up space for a multitude of new flowering plants to bloom, including vine-producing plants like grapes.

A team of scientists including USDA botanist Gregory Stull recently described a cache of fossilized grape seeds, some of which date back to the early aftermath of the asteroid impact. In a paper published in the journal Nature Plants in July, the researchers described nine species of ancient grapes, four of which are new to science, that were uncovered in sites in Colombia, Panama and Peru. One of the new species, Ampelocissus wenae, was named after museum botanist Jun Wen.

Researchers analyze historic samples from the asteroid Bennu

As it soared past Earth in September 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx dropped off a capsule containing rock and dust specimens from Bennu, a carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid. The material collectively weighs a little more than four ounces — or slightly heavier than a deck of cards. But they boast an outsized scientific importance and may contain insights into the origins of water and life on Earth.

Before researchers could analyze the cosmic clues preserved inside Bennu, they first had to take stock of the samples themselves. In June, an international team of researchers published an initial description of the various Bennu samples in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. The team, which included Tim McCoy, the museum’s curator of meteorites, provided insights into the mineralogical and chemical properties of the samples, laying a groundwork for more comprehensive analyses of Bennu in the future.

Genetic clues reveal when bird evolution took flight

Birds are exceptionally diverse, ranging from paperclip-size hummingbirds to nine-foot-tall ostriches. As a result, organizing this sprawling group of feathered creatures into a detailed family tree is no easy feat.

New insights into avian genetics are a boon to bird research. Research zoologist Gary Graves, the museum’s curator of birds, recently worked with an international team of scientists to compare the genomes of 363 bird species. Their work, published in the journal Nature in April, yielded one of the most comprehensive looks at avian evolution to date. The new work revealed several evolutionary milestones, including the rapid diversification of birds following the extinction of other dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.

Jack Tamisiea | | READ MORE

Jack Tamisiea is a Science Communications Specialist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In addition to covering all things natural history for the museum's blog, Smithsonian Voices, he tracks media coverage and coordinates filming activities for the museum's Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Jack recently completed his masters in science writing at Johns Hopkins University and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic and other science-focused publications. In his free time, he loves exploring the outdoors with a sketchbook and camera. You can read more of Jack's work at https://jacktamisiea.com.