Natural History

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Articles in Sept, 2004 issue of Natural History

• Cryptic creatures
• From water hole to rhino barn: twelve million years ago, a volcanic ashfall entombed prehistoric animals that roamed what is now Nebraska
  by Sandy S. Mosel
• Fitness test
  by Tucker McCrady
• Not dead yet
  by Brent E. Martin
• How plants "see": plants catch light for the information it carries as well as for its energy. The light helps plants determine when to germinate, when to flower, or how to respond to neighboring plants
  by Marcelo J. Yanovsky
• Museum events: American Museum of Natural History
• Picturing planets
• "A paradox to everyone but himself": the naturalist who almost scooped Darwin about natural selection was also an ardent mystic
  by Menno Schilthuizen
• Defying gravity
• Slip-sliding away
  by Robert Anderson
• Breaking up is hard to time
  by T.J. Kelleher
• Mission impossible
  by Bernd Heinrich
• A room revisited: a contemporary artist is inspired by a "cabinet of curiosities" collected by a naturalist of another era
  by Rosamond Wolff Purcell
• Rest stop
  by Erin Espeli
• What is a picture worth?
• Postcards from space
  by Joe Rao
• Getting warmer
  by Spencer R. Weart
• Bad behavior?
  by Henry Schlinger
• The sex lives of scales: scale insects have evolved one bizarre genetic system after another. The author argues that they are caught in a game of cat and mouse with internal, symbiotic bacteria, which has unleashed genetic bedlam
  by Benjamin B. Normark
• The transit of Venus
• The Big One: the Earthquake that Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science
  by Laurence A. Marschall
• It came from outer space
  by Peter Brown
• Ablaze from afar: astronomers may have identified the most distant "blazar" yet
  by Charles Liu
• Grains of evidence
• Little souls
  by Mary Fain
• Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks: Travels of a Water-Bound Adventurer
  by Laurence A. Marschall
• Hunters and freeloaders
  by Nick W. Atkinson
• Flexible feeders: the lower bill of the hummingbird makes a nectar-drinking beak into one for catching insects
  by Adam Summers
• The sky in September
  by Joe Rao
• Fried rice
  by Stephan Reebs
• Secret survivor: "extinct" for 50 million years, an enigmatic fossil species may still live at the bottom of the sea—but it defies capture
  by Peter A. Rona
• High School Science Research Program
• A young visitor to the special exhibition frogs: a Chorus of Colors gets up close and personal with a bright blue dart poison frog
• In June 2004, using the latest digital x-ray technology, scientists peeked under the skin of the African elephants in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals to see how the interior scaffolding of wood and metal is holding up
• Artistic license
  by Warren Whitaker
• Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid
  by Laurence A. Marschall
• Hard-hat zone
• The Information trap: tempted by the devil in the details
  by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The earth machine