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Featured Discoveries
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum: The Tucson Place Where the Desert Comes Alive
On Tucson’s western edge, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum brings a living desert into one carefully shaped landscape—part zoo, part botanical garden, part natural-history museum, and part walking trail.
Read more →Lascaux: How Four Teenagers Found a Window Into Ice Age Life
In 1940, a chance exploration near Montignac revealed one of the world’s great prehistoric art sites—and taught modern archaeologists how fragile the distant past can be.
Read more →The Hellbender: How a Giant Salamander Is Finding a Future in American Rivers
North America’s largest salamander is helping conservationists protect the cool, rocky streams it needs to survive. Across the eastern United States, captive breeding, habitat restoration, and careful monitoring are giving…
Read more →Latest Discoveries
The Monarch’s Hidden Winter: How a Butterfly Migration Was Traced Across a Continent
For decades, researchers tagged monarchs without knowing where the eastern population spent winter. A network of observers eventually helped reveal a mountain…
Read more →Bowling Green’s Corvette Country: How Kentucky Gave America’s Sports Car a Home
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Corvette is more than a celebrated automobile. It is a factory, museum, gathering place, and hometown tradition…
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The Ozark Hellbender Is Finding Its Way Back to Missouri’s Rivers
Captive breeding, careful monitoring, and cleaner stream habitat are giving one of North America’s largest salamanders a better chance to survive in…
Read more →The Smithsonian Folklife Festival: How Living Traditions Found a Place on the National Mall
For more than half a century, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has invited musicians, cooks, craftspeople, farmers, storytellers, and communities to present culture…
Read more →The Oldsmobile Toronado: How America Put Front-Wheel Drive Back on the Map
When Oldsmobile unveiled the Toronado for 1966, it did more than create a striking new coupe. It revived front-wheel drive as a…
Read more →Eunice Foote: How a 19th-Century Scientist Helped Put Climate Science on the Record
Before modern climate science had its vocabulary, Eunice Foote carried out a simple experiment that connected carbon dioxide with heat. Her work…
Read more →San Xavier del Bac: How an O’odham Community Keeps Arizona’s Mission Story Alive
South of Tucson, San Xavier del Bac is more than a celebrated historic church. It is a living O’odham community, an active place of worship and one of Arizona’s clearest windows into the layered history of the Sonoran Desert.
