Description: The first thing that I thought of when we started discussing our new call for entry, "seeing other worlds," was Google Earth. When Google Earth first came out in 2004, I remember the novelty of being able to zoom into my hometown to point out details to college friends, and having them pan across their own homes and favorite travel spots. We could travel across the globe
Description: 100 years ago in August of 1914, the Panama Canal opened to commercial shipping. Smithsonian scientists knew the canal would create major environmental changes and have spent the last 100 years documenting them.
Description: Each week, the Archives features a woman who has been a groundbreaker at the Smithsonian, past or present, in a series titled Wonderful Women Wednesday.
Description: Gorgeous rights-free illustrations of caterpillars from a German entomological by Christian Friedrich Vogel volume in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. [via Public Domain Review]A look at the first multispecies experimental coral microcosm in the world installed at our National Museum of Natural History in 1980. [via Ocean Portal]You can explore over 30,000 NY Historic
Description: What was the Saint Augustine Monster? According to Wikipedia, it was a globster—“an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water.” This great-grandaddy of globsters kept cryptozoologists speculating and scientists testing for a century—and a piece of it lives at the Smithsonian. The St. Augustine monster was discovered by two
Description: It was July 1880 in Washington, DC and Smithsonian Secretary, Spencer Baird, had fled the city with his family for cool ocean breezes and to study the fishing grounds off the New England coast at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. For those left behind minding the Smithsonian Castle, it was probably hot, humid, and hellish in town and they were in need of relief. Luckily, the proprietors
Description: Have a little fun with images from our collections that have been designated as open access. Anyone can now download, transform, share, and reuse millions of images as part of Smithsonian Open Access.