Nature reports

If a dried specimen of an extinct plant species still has seeds in a herbarium, is the plant really extinct? A global team of scientists toyed with that question. To arrive at the answer, they made a survey of all extinct plants..

The plant genus Phyllanthus was large and complex. PhD student Roderick Bouman disentangled it. ..

Biology students from Leiden University have discovered two tree frog species in the Dutch coastal dunes that do not occur there naturally. A special DNA-technique revealed these potentially harmful tree frogs. Remarkable, but..

An international team of researchers has discovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur in western Romania and named it after its location in Transylvania: Transylvanosaurus platycephalus lived about 70 million years ago, and..

In 2018 , Naturalis Biodiversity Center conducted the first mosquito survey for the Dutch Leeward Islands – Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius and Saba – in more than 70 years. In November, they plan to repeat these surveys, this time..

Since October 2022, Xeno-canto, the largest website for sound recordings of birds, has been updated with grasshoppers. This opens the possibility for naturalists to share recordings of grasshoppers. It also facilitates the..

In the heart of the Amazon Rainforest stands a three hundred meters high tower. There, Naturalis scientists collect airborne pollen and fungal spores to better understand how ecosystems evolve...

Why do some plants grow into large woody shrubs or colossal trees, while others remain small and never produce wood in their stems? It’s an evolutionary puzzle that already baffled Charles Darwin more than 160 year ago. Now,..

While studying coral reefs on Curaçao, a team of researchers from Naturalis and the University of Groningen came across what turned out to be a worm snail. Up until now, these animals had not been known in the Caribbean. Their..

The Netherlands is known for its beautiful and colourful tulips. Though most tulips originate from the Ottoman empire, Tulipa sylvestris, the wild tulip, followed a different path. Anastasia Stefanaki and Tinde van Andel, both..