News

Study Shows Infrared Radiation From Plants Serves as Invitation to Pollinating Insects

December 12, 2025

In a new study published as a cover story in Science, the team led by MCZ alum Wendy Valencia-Montoya (PhD '25) reports that cycads, an ancient lineage of seed plants dating back roughly 275 million years, actively heat their reproductive cones to attract...

Ticks on an Eel: Museum Specimen is a First of its Kind

December 08, 2025

One of Kaylin's projects involves finding ticks attached to animals in MCZ collections and she was recently directed to an eel specimen in our ichthyology collection that was collected over 150 years ago. Read about why this is a notable find in...

Fossils Reveal the World’s Most Persistent Parasite

October 30, 2025

Those tiny “question marks” etched into ancient shells? They’re not random scratches—they’re the calling cards of a 480-million-year-old parasite! A new study Published in iScience has revealed that a parasite still plaguing modern oysters today has been...

Sea Scorpions Just Got a Lot Older — and a Lot Scarier

November 21, 2025

A set of spiny fossil limbs pulled from ancient rock in Morocco has pushed the origin story of “sea scorpions” back in time, revealing that these fearsome predators were already highly specialized hunters nearly half a billion years ago. A new study...

2024-2025 Annual Report of the MCZ

November 17, 2025

Read about current research grants, research projects making headlines, news from our collections, and more in our annual report on everything and everyone in the MCZ.

From the Depths to Discovery: A Tiny Limpet Reveals Big Secrets of the Deep Sea

November 06, 2025

In the inky depths of the Central Pacific Ocean, nearly 2,400 meters below the surface, scientists have discovered a new species of deep-sea limpet clinging to a sunken log. During a 2023 expedition aboard the E/V Nautilus, scientists using the remotely...

Creepy Crawlies and Sticky Murder Weapons at Harvard

October 29, 2025

MCZ Director's research on velvet worms and a new exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History are featured in the Harvard Magazine.

Javier Ortega-Hernández featured in Harvard Magazine's Five Questions

September 05, 2025

Javier Ortega-Hernández, MCZ Faculty-Curator in Invertebrate Paleontology, is featured in Harvard Magazine's Five Questions. Five Questions with Javier Ortega-Hernández: A professor of evolutionary biology on what shaped life more than 500 million years...

Nautilus Reveals Unexpected Sex Chromosome System

August 18, 2025

Nautiloids—a lineage of ancient, externally-shelled cephalopods that diverged from their octopus and squid relatives over 400 million years ago—once dominated our oceans. Today, this living fossil is restricted to a handful of species in the Southern Indo...

Ancient Arthropods on the Move: Unraveling the Secret Steps of the Burgess Shale Trilobites

August 04, 2025

The Burgess Shale in British Columbia is renowned for its exceptional preservation of soft tissues in fossils, including limbs and guts. While trilobites are abundant in the fossil record thanks to their hard exoskeleton, their soft limbs are rarely...

A century-old museum specimen turns out to be a landmark in evolution

July 23, 2025

In a twist worthy of a detective novel, a long-misidentified fossil at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) has emerged as a key discovery in early animal evolution. Originally described in 1865 as a caterpillar, Palaeocampa anthraxshuffled...

Neural study shows how evolution prepared two species to adopt different survival strategies to take advantage of native habitats

July 29, 2025

Research out of the Hoekstra Lab shows how evolution prepared two species to adopt different survival strategies to take advantage of native habitats. Read about the research in the Harvard Gazette feature "You’re a deer mouse, and bird is diving at you...