Playful bear cubs and a swirling superpod of dolphins compete for People's Choice honors. Josef has wanted to photograph lynxes for a long time. He was delighted when the opportunity arose to spend two weeks observing them from a hide at Torre de Juan Abad, Ciudad Real, Spain. It's common for young lynxes to play with their prey before killing it. This one repeatedly threw the rodent high in the air and caught it again.

The team even extracted DNA from a tiny 100-year-old butterfly leg. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When you think of butterflies, chances are you imagine unmistakable insects with bright, bold wings. But it turns out that individual butterfly species are sometimes shockingly difficult to tell apart. "Thanks to the genetic revolution and the collaboration of researchers and museums in various countries led by London's Natural History Museum, century-old butterflies are now speaking to us," Christophe Faynel, an entomologist at the Société entomologique Antilles Guyane, said in a statement .

Yuen Ting Chan has nearly 20 years of experience working on translating, developing and optimising laboratory protocols, from DNA forensics to the biomedical field. She has brought automation to molecular laboratories for over 12 years, translating the laboratory protocols into bespoke scripts for a wide variety of liquid handling instruments. Her role at the Natural History Museum is to bring automation to the molecular laboratories, thus providing more opportunities for researchers to work on projects with large sample numbers for the wide variety of specimens within the museum. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For 20 years, the remains of a giant lizard that lived alongside dinosaurs were tucked away in a jar at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Simply labeled "lizard," the fragmented and several millennia-old bones actually belonged to an entirely new species of giant lizard dug up from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 2005. Bolg amondol was a raccoon-sized armored mostesaurian lizard that lived about 77 million years ago, similar to today's Gila monsters (Heloderma horridum). It is named after the goblin prince from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and is described in a study published June 17 in the open-access journal Royal Society Open Science.

Teeth found in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Dorset are believed to belong to the maniraptorans, a group of dinosaurs, including Velociraptor, which include birds as their closest relatives. These dinosaurs evolved into numerous species during the Middle Jurassic, but because fossils during this time are scarce, knowledge of their origins are scarce too. Researchers from the Natural History Museum and Birkbeck College used pioneering machine learning techniques to train computer models to identify the mystery teeth, which push back the origin of some of the group's members by almost 30 million years. Simon Wills, a Ph.D. student at the Natural History Museum who led the research, says, "Previous research had suggested that the maniraptorans were around in the Middle Jurassic, but the actual fossil evidence was patchy and disputed. Along with fossils found elsewhere, this research suggests the group had already achieved a global distribution by this time."

Mysterious ancient teeth found in three English counties are believed to belong to a dinosaur with scissor-like claws which roamed Britain 168 million years ago. Paleontologists said the fossils unearthed in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Dorset were the first ever examples of therizinosaur and troodontid dinosaurs on UK soil. Not only that, but the remains are the world's oldest-known evidence of those species and could represent some of the earliest relatives of birds ever discovered. Therizinosaurus – which featured in the most recent Jurassic World film – was a large herbivore dinosaur from the late Cretaceous known for its distinctive long scissor-like claw bones. Along with the troodontid and well-known Velociraptor, it belonged to a group of ancient creatures called the maniraptorans.

Researchers from Cardiff University are using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically segment and capture information from museum specimens and perform data quality improvement without human input. The university has been working with museums from across Europe including the Natural History Museum, London. The AI is being used to refine and validate new methods and contribute to the mammoth task of digitizing hundreds of millions of specimens. There are more than 3 billion biological and geological specimens in natural history museums globally. Digitizing these specimens -- where the physical information is transformed into a digital format -- has become a new task for museums as the digital world become ubiquitous. The digitalization helps reduce the amount of manual handling of specimens, which are delicate and prone to damage.

Scientists are using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to help extract complex information from large collections of museum specimens. A team from Cardiff University is using state-of-the-art techniques to automatically segment and capture information from museum specimens and perform important data quality improvement without the need of human input. They have been working with museums from across Europe, including the Natural History Museum, London, to refine and validate their new methods and contribute to the mammoth task of digitizing hundreds of millions of specimens. With more than 3 billion biological and geological specimens curated in natural history museums around the world, the digitization of museum specimens, in which physical information from a particular specimen is transformed into a digital format, has become an increasingly important task for museums as they adapt to an increasingly digital world. A treasure trove of digital information is invaluable for scientists trying to model the past, present and future of organisms and our planet, and could be key to tackling some of the biggest societal challenges our world faces today, from conserving biodiversity and tackling climate change to finding new ways to cope with emerging diseases like COVID-19.

Unprecedented access to thousands of artefacts gathered by the 18th century physician, naturalist and prolific collector Sir Hans Sloane, will be available online to everyone for free, thanks to a multi-million pound digital project led by UCL. Following his death, Sir Hans Sloane's collections formed the basis of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library. The Sloan Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections will bring Sloane's immense collections, ranging from coins to manuscripts and stuffed animals, which are currently held in a variety of locations, together online for the first time. Researchers will work with experts and communities to link up Sloane's collections, put them in context for the 21st century, and give new opportunities to search, explore and engage critically with the UK's cultural heritage online. The Sloane Lab is one of five'Discovery Projects' sharing £14.5m of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to democratise and decolonise the UK's culture and heritage collections.