Dozens of the world’s largest natural history museums revealed on Thursday a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to mosquitoes.

The survey’s organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the natural world.

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WASHINGTON — Long after the Covid pandemic emerged from Wuhan, the origin of the coronavirus remains a subject of intense scientific scrutiny, and even more intense political debate.

A team of researchers has added fuel to the bonfire by presenting data at a World Health Organization meeting suggesting a wild animal known as a raccoon dog was sold at the same stall at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where investigators found traces of the coronavirus.

In the 1800s, archaeologists began reconstructing the deep history of Europe from the bones of ancient hunter-gatherers and the iconic art they left behind, like cave paintings, fertility figurines and “lion-man” statues.

Over the past decade, geneticists have added a new dimension to that history by extracting DNA from teeth and bones.

And now, in a pair of studies published on Wednesday‌, researchers have produced the most robust analysis yet of the genetic record of prehistoric Europe.

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